LIBRARY 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

SANTA  BARBARA 

GEORGE   HAND 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 


A  NIGHT  IN  THE 

LUXEMBOURG 

BY    REMY   DE    GOURMONT 

WITH   PREFACE 

AND    APPENDIX 

BY   ARTHUR   RANSOME 


JOHN  W.  LUCE  AND  COMPANY 
BOSTON  MCMXIX 


CONTENTS 

Page 
TRANSLATOR'S   PREFACE.       By  Arthur  Ransome     .         .  9 

A     NIGHT    IN    THE     LUXEMBOURG.         By     Remy     de 
Gourmont 

Preface         ........         23 

A  Night  in  the  Luxembourg  .         .         .         .         35 

Final  Note 179 

APPENDIX:         REMY     DE    GOURMONT.  By    Arthur 

Ransome          .......       193 

AUTOGRAPHS  — 

KOPH  .         .         .         .         .         .         .         .         33 

Reduced  facsimile   of   the   last   page  of  M.  Rose's 

Manuscript  .    .    181 


TRANSLATOR'S   PREFACE 


TRANSLATOR'S  PREFACE 

A    GENERAL,    but    necessarily    inade- 
quate, account  of  the  personality  and 
works  of  one  of  the  finest  intellects 
of  his  generation  will  be  found  in  the 
Appendix.   I  am  here  concerned  only  with  Une 
Nuit  au  Luxembourg,  which,  though  it  is  widely 
read  in  almost  every  other  European  language, 
is  now  for  the  first  time  translated  into  Eng- 
lish. 

This  book,  at  once  criticism  and  romance, 
is  the  best  introduction  to  M.  de  Gourmont's 
very  various  works.  It  created  a  "sensation" 
in  France.  I  think  it  may  do  as  much  in  Eng- 
land, but  I  am  anxious  lest  this  "sensation" 
should  be  of  a  kind  honourable  neither  to  us 
nor  to  the  author  of  a  remarkable  book.  I  do 
not  wish  a  delicate  and  subtle  artist,  a  very 
noble  philosopher,  noble  even  if  smiling,  nobler 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

perhaps  because  he  smiles,  to  be  greeted  with 
accusations  of  indecency  and  blasphemy.  But  I 
cannot  help  recognising  that  in  England,  as  in 
many  other  countries,  these  accusations  are 
often  brought  against  such  philosophers  as 
discuss  in  a  manner  other  than  traditional  the 
subjects  of  God  and  woman.  These  two  sub- 
jects, with  many  others,  are  here  the  motives 
of  a  book  no  less  delightful  than  profound. 

The  duty  of  a  translator  is  not  comprised  in 
mere  fidelity.  He  must  reproduce  as  nearly  as 
he  can  the  spirit  and  form  of  his  original,  and, 
since  in  a  work  of  art  spirit  and  form  are  one, 
his  first  care  must  be  to  preserve  as  accurately 
as  possible  the  contours  and  the  shading  of  his 
model.  But  he  must  remember  (and  beg  his 
readers  to  remember)  that  the  intellectual  back- 
ground on  which  the  work  will  appear  in  its 
new  language  is  different  from  that  against 
which  it  was  conceived.  When  the  new  back- 
ground is  as  different  from  the  old  as  English 
from  French,  he  cannot  but  recognise  that  it 
disturbs  the  chiaroscuro  of  his  work  with  a 
quite  incalculable  light.  It  gives  the  contours 
a  new  quality  and  the  shadows  a  new  texture. 
His  own  accuracy  may  thus  give  his  work  an 

10 


TRANSLATOR'S  •  PREFACE 

atmosphere  not  that  which  its  original  author 
designed. 

I  have  been  placed  in  such  a  dilemma  in 
translating  this  book.  Certain  phrases  and  de- 
scriptions were,  in  the  French,  no  more  than 
delightful  sporting  of  the  intellect  with  the 
flesh  that  is  its  master.  In  the  English,  for  us, 
less  accustomed  to  plain-speaking,  and  far  less 
accustomed  to  a  playful  attitude  towards  mat- 
ters of  which  we  never  speak  unless  with  great 
solemnity,  they  became  wilful  parades  of  the 
indecent.  It  is  important  to  remember  that 
they  were  not  so  in  the  French,  but  were  such 
things  as  might  well  be  heard  in  a  story  told 
in  general  conversation  —  if  the  talkers  were 
Frenchmen  of  genius. 

There  is  no  ugliness  in  the  frank  acceptance 
of  the  flesh,  that  is  a  motive,  one  among  many, 
in  this  book,  and  perhaps  more  noticeable  by 
us  than  the  author  intended.  No  doubt  it  never 
occurred  to  M.  de  Gourmont  that  he  was 
writing  for  the  English.  We  are  only  for- 
tunate listeners  to  a  monologue,  and  must  not 
presume  upon  our  position  to  ask  him  to  re- 
member we  are  there. 

The  character  of  that  monologue  is  such,  I 

II 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

think,  as  to  justify  me  in  tampering  very  little 
with  its  design.  Not  only  is  Une  Nuit  au  Lux- 
embourg not  a  book  for  children  or  young  per- 
sons —  if  it  were,  the  question  would  be  alto- 
gether different  —  but  it  is  not  a  book  for  fools, 
or  even  for  quite  ordinary  people.  I  think 
that  no  reader  who  can  enjoy  the  philosophical 
discussion  that  is  its  greater  part  will  quarrel 
with  its  Epicurean  interludes.  He  will  either 
forgive  those  passages  of  which  I  am  speak- 
ing as  the  pardonable  idiosyncrasy  of  a  great 
man,  or  recognise  that  they  are  themselves  illus- 
trations of  his  philosophy,  essential  to  its  ex- 
position, and  raised  by  that  fact  into  an  intel- 
lectual light  that  justified  their  retention. 

The  prurient  minds  who  might  otherwise  peer 
at  these  passages,  and  enjoy  the  caricatures  that 
their  own  dark  lanterns  would  throw  on  the 
muddy  wall  of  their  comprehension,  will,  I 
think,  be  repelled  by  the  nobility  of  the  book's 
philosophy.  They  will  seek  their  truffles  else- 
where, and  find  plenty. 

M.  de  Gourmont  is  perhaps  more  likely  to 
be  attacked  for  blasphemy,  but  only  by  those 
who  do  not  observe  his  piety  towards  the  thing 
that  he  most  reverences,  the  purity  aixd  the 

12 


TRANSLATOR'S  •  PREFACE 

clarity  of  thought.  He  worships  in  a  temple 
not  easy  to  approach,  a  temple  where  the  wor- 
shippers are  few,  and  the  worship  difficult.  It 
is  impossible  not  to  respect  a  mind  that,  in 
its  consuming  desire  for  liberty,  strips  away 
not  fetters  only  but  supports.  Fetters  bind 
at  first,  but  later  it  is  hard  to  stand  without 
them. 

His  book  is  not  a  polemic  against  Christi- 
anity, in  the  same  sense  as  Nietzsche's  Anti- 
Christj  though  it  does  propose  an  ethic  and  an 
ideal  very  different  from  those  we  have  come 
to  consider  Christian.  When  he  smiles  at  the 
Acts  of  the  Apostles  as  at  a  fairy  tale,  he  adds 
a  sentence  of  incomparable  praise  and  profound 
criticism:  "These  men  touch  God  with  their 
hands. "  It  may  shock  some  people  to  find  that 
the  principal  speaker  in  the  book  is  a  god  who 
claims  to  have  inspired,  not  Christ  alone,  but 
Pythagoras,  Epicurus,  Lucretius,  St.  Paul  and 
Spinoza  with  the  most  valuable  of  their  doc- 
trines. It  will  not,  I  think,  shock  any  student 
of  comparative  religion.  He  will  find  it  no 
more  than  a  poet's  statement  of  an  idea  that 
has  long  ceased  to  disturb  the  devout,  the  idea 
that  all  religions  are  the  same,  or  translations 

13 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

of  the  same  religion.  We  recognise  in  the  say- 
ings of  Confucius  some  of  the  loveliest  of  the 
sayings  of  Christ,  and  we  find  them  again  in 
Mohammed.  Why  not  admit  that  the  same 
voice  whispered  in  their  ears,  for  this,  unless 
we  think  that  the  Devil  can  give  advice  as  good 
as  God's,  we  cannot  help  but  believe.  And 
that  other  idea,  that  the  gods  die,  though  their 
lives  are  long,  should  not  shock  those  who 
know  of  Odin,  notice  the  lessening  Christian 
reverence  for  the  Jewish  Jehovah,  and  remem- 
ber the  story,  so  often  and  so  sweetly  told,  of 
the  voices  on  the  Grecian  coast,  with  their  cry, 
"Great  Pan  is  dead!  Great  Pan  is  dead!" 

Turning  from  particular  ideas  to  the  rule  of 
life  that  the  book  proposes,  we  find  a  crystal- 
line Epicureanism.  Virtue  is,  to  be  happy;  and 
sin  is,  where  we  put  it.  "Human  wisdom  is 
to  live  as  if  one  were  never  to  die,  and  to 
gather  the  present  minute  as  if  it  were  to  be 
eternal."  This  is  no  doctrine  that  is  easy  to 
follow.  The  god  does  not  offer  it  to  the  first 
comer,  but  to  one  who  has  schooled  his  mind 
to  see  hard  things,  and,  having  seen  them,  to 
rise  above  them.  M.  de  Gourmont  will  tell  no 
lies  that  he  can  avoid,  especially  when  speak- 


TRANSLATOR'S  •  PREFACE 

ing  to  himself,  but, if  he  burn  himself,  Phoenix- 
like,  in  the  ashes  of  a  sentimental  universe,  he 
has  at  least  the  hope  of  rising  from  the  pyre 
with  stronger  wings  and  more  triumphant 
flight.  He  will  start  with  no  more  than  the 
assumption  that  the  universe  as  we  know  it  is 
the  product  of  a  series  of  accidents.  He  will  not 
persuade  himself  that  man  is  the  climax  of  a 
carefully  planned  mechanical  process  of  evolu- 
tion, nor  will  he  hide  his  origin  in  imagery  like 
that  of  Genesis,  or  like  that  which  certain  mod- 
ern scientists  are  quite  unable  to  avoid.  He 
turns  science  against  the  scientists  with  the 
irrefutable  remark  that  only  a  change  in  the 
temperature  saved  us  from  the  dominion  of  ants. 
Instinct  for  him  is  arrested  intellect,  and  he  is 
ready  to  imagine  man  in  the  future  doing  me- 
chanically what  now  he  does  by  intention.  Such 
ideas  would  crush  a  feeble  brain  or  bind  it  with 
despair.  They  lead  him  to  the  Epicureanism 
that  is  the  only  philosophy  that  they  do  not 
overthrow.  Our  roses  and  our  women  make 
us  the  equals  of  the  gods,  and  even  envied  by 
them. 

All  his  criticism,   not  of  one  or  two  ideas 
alone,  but  of  the  history  of  philosophy,  the 

IS 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

history  of  woman,  the  history  of  man  and  the 
history  of  religion,  is  made  with  a  mastery  so 
absolute  as  to  dare  to  be  playful.  The  winter 
night  was  changed  to  a  spring  morning  as  the 
god  walked  in  the  Luxembourg,  and  the  wintry 
cold  of  nineteenth-century  science  melts  in  the 
warmth  of  a  spring-time  no  less  magical.  The 
book  might  be  grim.  It  is  clear-eyed  and 
sparkling  with  dew,  like  a  sonnet  by  Ron- 
sard. 

"Comme  on  voit  sur  une  branche  au  mois  de  mai  la  rose," 

so  one  sees  the  philosophy  of  M.  de  Gourmont, 
not  quarried  stone,  but  a  flower,  so  light,  so 
delicate,  as  to  make  us  forget  the  worlds  that 
have  been  overthrown  in  its  manufacture. 

I  remember  near  the  end  of  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress  there  is  a  passage  of  dancing.  Giant 
Despair  has  been  killed,  and  Doubting  Castle 
demolished.  The  pilgrims  were  "very  jocund 
and  merry."  "Now  Christiana,  if  need  was, 
could  play  upon  the  viol,  and  her  daughter 
Mercy  upon  the  lute;  so,  since  they  were  so 
merry  disposed,  she  played  them  a  lesson, 
and  Ready-to-halt  would  dance.  So  he  took 

16 


TRANSLATOR'S  •  PREFACE 

Despondency's  daughter,  Much-afraid,  by  the 
hand,  and  to  dancing  they  went  in  the  road. 
True,  he  could  not  dance  without  one  crutch 
in  his  hand;  but  I  promise  you  he  footed  it 
well;  also  the  girl  was  to  be  commended,  for 
she  answered  the  music  handsomely."  Just 
so,  in  this  book,  on  a  journey  no  less  perilous 
among  ideas,  there  is  an  atmosphere  of  genial 
entertainment,  a  delight  in  the  things  of  the 
senses  illumined  by  a  delight  in  the  things  of 
the  mind.  And  in  this  there  is  no  irreverence. 
Only  those  who  have  ceased  to  believe  have 
forgotten  how  to  dance  in  the  presence  of  their 
God. 

Perhaps  the  technician  alone  will  observe  the 
skill  with  which  M.  de  Gourmont  has  handled 
the  most  difficult  of  literary  forms.  In  trans- 
lating a  book  one  becomes  fairly  intimate  with 
it,  and  not  the  least  pleasure  of  my  intimacy 
with  Une  Nuit  au  Luxembourg  has  been  to 
notice  the  ease  and  the  grace  with  which  its 
author  turns,  always  at  the  right  moment,  from 
ideas  to  images,  from  romance  to  thought. 
"The  exercise  of  thought  is  a  game,"  he  says, 
"but  this  game  must  be  free  and  harmonious." 
And  the  outward  impression  given  by  this  subtly 

17 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

constructed  book  is  that  of  an  intellect  playing 
harmoniously  with  itself  in  a  state  of  joyful 
liberty.  M.  de  Gourmont  is  a  master  of  his 
moods,  knowing  how  to  serve  them;  and  no 
less  admirable  than  the  loftiest  moment  of  the 
discussion,  is  the  Callot-like  grotesque  of  the 
three  goddesses,  seen  not  as  divinities  but  as 
sins,  or  the  Virgilian  breakfast  under  the  trees. 
It  is  possible  that  Une  Nuit  au  Luxembourg 
may  be  for  a  few  in  our  generation  what 
Mademoiselle  de  Maupin  was  for  a  few  in  the 
generation  of  Swinburne,  a  "golden  book  of 
spirit  and  sense."  Ideas  are  dangerous  metal 
in  which  to  mould  romances,  because  from  time 
to  time  they  tarnish.  Voltaire  has  had  his 
moments  of  being  dull,  and  Gautier's  ideas  do 
not  excite  us  now.  M.  de  Gourmont's  may 
not  move  us  to-morrow.  Let  us  enjoy  them 
to-day,  and  share  the  pleasure  that  the  people 
of  the  day  after  to-morrow  will  certainly  not 
refuse. 

ARTHUR  RANSOME. 


18 


A  •  NIGHT .  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 
BY  REMY  DE  GOURMONT 


PREFACE 


PREFACE 


T 


HERE  appeared    in    Le    Temps   of 
the  1 3th  of  February,  1906:  — 

"  OBITUARY 


"We  have  just  learned  of  the  sudden 
death  of  one  of  our  confreres  on  the 
foreign  press,  M.  James  Sandy  Rose, 
deceased  yesterday,  Sunday,  in  his  rooms 
at  14  Rue  de  Medicis.  Notwithstanding 
this  English  name,  he  was  a  Frenchman; 
born  at  Nantes  in  1865,  his  true  name  was 
Louis  Delacolombe.  He  was  brought 
up  in  the  United  States,  returned  to 
France  ten  years  ago,  and  from  that  time 
till  his  death  was  the  highly  valued 
correspondent  of  the  Northern  Atlantic 
Herald." 

On  the  following  day,  the  I4th  of  Febru- 

23 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

ary,    the   same  journal   printed   this   note 
among  its  miscellaneous  news:  — 


"We  announced  yesterday  the  sudden 
death  of  M.  James  Sandy  Rose,  our  con- 
frere on  the  foreign  press.  His  death 
seems  to  have  taken  place  under  suspicious 
circumstances.  At  present  a  woman  of  the 

Latin  Quarter,  Blanche  B ,  is  strongly 

suspected  of  having  been  at  least  an  accom- 
plice to  it.  This  woman  is  known  for  her 
habit  of  dressing  in  very  light  colours,  even 
in  mid-winter,  and  it  was  this  that  made 
the  concierge  notice  her.  She  lives,  more- 
over, behind  the  house  of  the  crime  —  as- 
suming that  there  has  been  a  crime  —  in 
the  Rue  de  Vaugirard.  This  is  what  is 
said  to  have  happened:  — 

"Because  M.  J.  S.  Rose,  who  was  of 
fairly  regular  habits,  had  not  been  seen  for 
some  days,  his  door  was  broken  open,  and 
he  was  discovered  inanimate.  He  had  been 
dead  for  a  few  hours  only,  a  fact  which 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

does  not  agree  with  the  length  of  time 
during  which  he  had  remained  invisible, 
and  still  further  complicates  the  question. 

It  is  supposed  that  the  woman  B ,  after 

passing  the  night  with  him,  put  him  to 
sleep  by  means  of  a  narcotic  (from  which 
the  unhappy  man  did  not  awake),  or 
strangled  him  at  a  moment  when  he  was 
defenceless;  then,  her  theft  accomplished, 
she  would  seem  to  have  fled  precipitately. 
An  extraordinary  circumstance  is  that  in 
her  haste  she  forgot  her  dress,  and  must 
have  gone  out  enveloped  in  a  big  cloak.  At 
least  there  is  no  other  explanation  of  the 
presence  of  an  elegant  white  robe  in  the 
rooms  of  M.  Rose,  who  lived  alone.  ..." 

On  the  next  day  again,  there  was  a  third 
echo: — 

"THE  MYSTERY  OF  THE  RUE  DE  MEDICIS 

"It  appears  that  the  young  woman  at 
first  implicated  in  this  affair  has  been  for 

a  fortnight  at  Menton  with  M.  Pap , 

25 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

a  deputy  from  the  banks  of  the  Danube. 
They  have  both  written  from  that  place 
to  mutual  friends.  The  inquiry  makes  no 
progress;  on  the  contrary  ..." 

Other  papers,  that  I  then  had  the  curios- 
ity to  examine,  had  embroidered  my 
friend's  death  with  still  madder  tales.  As 
the  police,  with  very  good  reason,  made 
no  communications  to  the  press,  the  jour- 
nalists pushed  unreason  to  insanity;  then, 
as  their  imaginations  could  go  no  further, 
they  were  silent. 

In  reality,  the  mixing  up  of  Blanche 

B with  the  story  was  due  solely  to  the 

chatter  of  a  young  clerk,  a  neighbur  of 
M.  James  Sandy  Rose,  who  had  noticed 
a  woman's  dress  of  white  material  in  the 
room.  I  recount,  at  the  end  of  the  volume, 
the  facts  which  disturbed  this  pubescent 
imagination.  Neither  the  police,  who  im- 
mediately lost  interest  in  the  affair,  nor  jus- 
tice, which  had  never  taken  any,  would 
have  been  able  to  implicate  anybody  in  a 
"mystery"  which,  if  it  is  really  a  mystery, 

26 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

is  not  one  of  those  that  police  or  magis- 
trates can  resolve. 

For  some  days  following,  Le  Temps  left 
the  Rue  de  Medicis  alone.  At  the  end  of 
a  fortnight,  a  very  talkative  young  jour- 
nalist, accompanied  by  an  old  gentleman 
who,  like  him,  took  notes  in  a  pocketbook, 
but  said  nothing,  came  and  rang  at  my 
door.  He  came  with  the  intention  of  ques- 
tioning me.  I  was  willing  enough  to  reply 
that  M.  James  S.  Rose  had  died  of  apo- 
plexy, or,  at  least,  suddenly;  that  I  was 
his  friend,  and  that  he  had  made  me  his 
heir;  that  the  rumours  of  crime  were  ab- 
surd, and  the  rumours  of  "mystery"  ridic- 
ulous. 

"What  is  there,"  I  said,  "more  normal 
than  death?" 

The  old  gentleman  acquiesced,  while  the 
young  journalist  murmured  — 

"And  yet  ..." 

"The  only  thing  of  interest,"  I  contin- 
ued, "  in  this  banal  story,  sad,  perhaps,  for 
me  alone,  is  that  M.  James  Sandy  Rose 
leaves  an  unpublished  work  which  in  his 

27 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

will  he  has  charged  me  to  bring  out.  I 
am  going  to  do  this.  ..." 

I  threw  a  persuasive  glance  at  the  young 
journalist. 

"It  is  one  of  the  most  curious  books  I 
have  ever  read,  and,  though  the  author 
was  my  familiar  friend,  it  is  a  revelation 
tome.  ..." 

"Really?" 

"It  is  indeed  so.  The  public,  without 
knowing  what  there  is  in  the  book,  await 
it  with  impatience. " 

"Ah!" 

"When  you  have  read  it,  when  you  have 
merely  seen  it,  you  will  agree  with 


me.': 


This  innocent  advertisement  was  duly 
inserted  in  Le  Temps  and  in  Le  Nouveau 
Courrier  des  Provinces,  to  which  the  old 
gentleman  had  been  asked  to  contribute. 
I  gained  some  moments  of  amusement, 
nothing  more. 

Here  is  the  book,  of  course  without  com- 
mentaries. In  accordance  with  the  impera- 
tive requirements  of  the  will,  I  have  not 

28 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

corrected  its  style,  but  revised  it  where  that 
was  necessary,  for  Louis  Delacolombe,  edu- 
cated in  English,  had  retained  some  traces 
of  his  school-years  in  his  language.  I  think 
that  it  was  written  as  fast  as  the  pen  would 
move,  and  with  a  feverish  hand,  in  the  space 
of  a  few  days. 

I  have  summarised  in  a  final  note  the 
results  of  my  personal  inquiry.  There  is  no 
need  to  read  it,  but  I  think,  however,  that  it 
will  interest  those  whose  curiosity  is  aroused 
by  my  friend's  enigmatical  narrative. 

P.  S.  -  -  The  drawing  on  page  33,  which 
is  from  the  hand  of  M.  Sandy  Rose,  and 
which  I  have  inserted  at  the  place  that  he 
had  indicated,  may  have  a  meaning,  but, 
if  so,  I  have  been  unable  to  penetrate  it. 
It  seems  to  represent  a  Greek  medal  dedi- 
cated to  the  goddess  Core.  But  KOPH 
means  also  young  girl,  and  even  doll.  Be- 
sides, are  such  medals  known? 


29 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 


A  NIGHT  IN  THE 
LUXEMBOURG 

I  AM  certainly  drunk,  yet  my  lucidity 
is  very  great.  Drunk  with  love, 
drunk  with  pride,  drunk  with 
divinity,  I  see  clearly  things  that  I  do  not 
very  well  understand,  and  these  things  I 
am  about  to  narrate.  My  adventure  un- 
rolls before  my  eyes  with  perfect  sharpness 
of  outline;  it  is  a  piece  of  faery  in  which 
I  am  still  taking  part;  I  am  still  in  the 
midst  of  lights,  of  gestures,  of  voices.  .  .  . 
She  is  there.  I  have  only  to  turn  my  head 
to  observe  her;  I  have  only  to  rise  to  go  and 
touch  her  body  with  my  hands,  and  with 
my  lips.  .  .  .  She  is  there.  A  privileged 
spectator,  I  have  carried  away  with  me  the 
queen  of  the  spectacle,  a  proof  that  the 

35 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

spectacle  was  one  of  the  days  of  my  actual 
life.  That  day  was  a  night,  but  a  night  lit 
by  a  Spring  sun,  and,  behold,  it  continues, 
night  or  day,  I  do  not  know.  .  .  .  The 
queen  is  there.  But  I  must  write. 

The  abridged  story  of  my  adventure  will 
appear  to-morrow  morning  in  the  Northern 
Atlantic  Herald,  and  will  soon  make  the 
circuit  of  the  American  press,  to  return  to 
us  through  the  English  agencies:  but  that 
does  not  satisfy  me.  I  telegraphed,  because 
it  was  my  duty;  I  write,  because  it  is  my 
pleasure.  Besides,  experience  has  taught 
me  that  news  gains  rather  in  precision  than 
in  exactitude  in  its  journeys  from  cable  to 
cable,  and  I  am  anxious  for  exactitude. 

With  what  happiness  I  am  going  to  write! 
I  feel  in  my  head,  in  my  fingers,  an  un- 
heard-of facility.  .  .  . 

On  the  first  intelligence  of  the  pious  riots 
that  transformed  into  fortresses  our  peace- 
ful churches,  peaceful  after  the  manner  of 
old  haunted  castles,  the  newspaper  that  I 
have  represented  for  ten  years  asked  me, 
with  a  certain  impatience,  for  details.  As 

36 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I  live  in  the  Rue  de  Medicis,  having  a  long- 
standing passion  for  the  Luxembourg,  its 
trees,  its  women,  its  birds,  I  went  down 
towards  the  Place  Saint-Sulpice.  The 
square  was  occupied  by  children,  playing  as 
they  returned  from  school;  round  it  rolled 
great  empty  omnibuses;  now  and  again  a 
tramcar  widowed  of  a  horse  left  with  dif- 
ficulty, while  another  struggled  up  and 
turned  round  without  grace.  My  pro- 
longed stay  in  Paris  has  made  me  an  idler 
like  every  one  else.  Nothing  astonishes  me, 
and  everything  amuses  me.  Besides,  I  am 
by  nature  at  once  sceptical  and  inquisitive. 
That  is  why,  when  I  lifted  my  eyes  towards 
the  church,  my  attention  was  vividly  excited 
by  the  fact  that  the  windows  on  the  side 
towards  the  Rue  Palatine  seemed  lit  by  the 
rays  of  a  brilliant  sunset.  But  the  sun  had 
not  shone  that  day,  and,  even  if  the  sky  had 
been  clear,  no  reflection  could,  at  that  late 
hour,  light  the  south  side  of  the  church  of 
Saint-Sulpice.  I  thought  of  a  fire,  but  no 
trace  of  one  was  to  be  seen  in  the  sky.  Some- 
thing unusual  was  certainly  going  on  in- 

37 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

side.  I  hurried  towards  the  door  in  the 
Rue  Palatine.  As  I  advanced,  without 
losing  sight  of  the  windows,  I  perceived 
that  the  light  seemed  to  be  coming  down  the 
length  of  the  church,  as  if  blazing  torches 
were  being  carried  about  in  this  transept 
of  the  nave.  At  the  moment  when  I  went 
in,  the  windows  by  the  choir  began  to  shine, 
while  those  nearer  the  front  of  the  church 
were  now  obscure. 

Pushing  open  the  door,  I  went  towards 
the  chapel  of  the  Virgin,  behind  the  high 
altar.  It  seemed  lit  up  as  if  for  a  feast-day, 
and  yet  I  heard  no  chanting,  no  music,  I 
perceived  no  noise.  I  advanced  with  steps 
that  I  thought  precipitate,  but  which  were, 
on  the  contrary,  very  slow,  for,  to  my  great 
shame,  I  felt  myself  trembling:  in  the  deep 
silence  of  this  mournful  basilica  my  heart, 
it  seemed  to  me,  beat  like  a  bell.  At  one 
moment  the  lights  of  the  chapel  shone  with 
such  brilliance  that  I  had  to  shut  my  eyes. 
When  I  reopened  them,  it  was  dark,  and 
some  lamps  alone  shed  their  vague,  accus- 
tomed lights  in  the  now  complete  obscurity. 

38 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

A  man  stood  upright,  his  hand  resting 
on  the  closed  railings  of  the  chapel.  He 
seemed  in  every  way  ordinary.  Nothing 
was  remarkable  but  the  profound  attention 
with  which  he  was  observing  the  statue  of 
the  Virgin.  I  wished  to  keep  on  my  way, 
anxious  to  question  some  priest  or  sacristan, 
first  on  the  luminous  phenomenon,  which 
puzzled  me  very  much,  and  then,  as  was 
my  duty,  on  the  events  which  were  doubt- 
less preparing  for  the  next  day;  I  wished 
to  keep  on  my  way,  I  was  in  a  hurry  to 
finish  my  business,  for  I  do  not  find 
churches,  especially  at  evening,  agreeable 
resting-places;  I  wished  to  go  away,  I 
wished  to  speak,  but  I  felt  that  I  was  fast- 
ened to  the  flag-stones,  I  trembled  more 
and  more,  and,  finally,  I  could  not  prevent 
myself  from  observing  the  unknown  man. 
I  saw  him  in  profile.  His  hair,  worn  short, 
slightly  curled,  seemed  to  me  to  be  chestnut, 
like  his  beard,  which  was  full,  not  very  thick 
on  the  cheeks,  and  of  moderate  length. 
His  clothes  were  much  like  my  own;  they 
were  those  of  a  gentleman,  correct  but  un- 

39 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

pretentious.  I  felt  I  was  going  mad,  in  my 
inability  to  explain  the  interest  that  stopped 
me  before  so  common  a  sight.  I  under- 
stood no  better  the  attention  with  which  the 
unknown  stared  at  the  Virgin. 

A  connoisseur  of  art  would  have  quickly 
passed  on;  a  devotee  would  have  knelt.  I 
was  beginning  to  lose  my  head,  to  think 
that  I  was  ill,  when  the  man,  so  ordinary 
and  yet  so  singular,  turned  his  eyes  towards 
me.  These  eyes,  extremely  brilliant,  com- 
pleted my  discomfiture.  I  lowered  my 
own,  not  before  I  had  observed  that  the 
very  pale  face  was  one  of  the  gentlest  and 
most  understanding  I  had  ever  seen.  I 
even  thought  that  I  discerned  on  those 
delicate  features  a  smile  of  infinitely  be- 
nevolent irony,  like  those  I  have  seen  in 
certain  protraits  of  beautiful  Lombard 
women.  This  smile  enchanted  and  intimi- 
dated me  at  the  same  time.  "It  would  be 
a  great  happiness, "  I  said  to  myself,  my  eyes 
still  lowered,  "if  I  could  once  again  enjoy 
that  smile, "  but  I  dared  not  look  at  the  un- 
known, who,  I  divined,  was  still  observ- 
40 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

ing  me.  I  no  longer  trembled,  but  felt  my- 
self in  that  state  of  happy  confusion  which 
one  experiences  in  the  presence  of  a  woman 
whom  one  loves  and  fears.  I  expected  noth- 
ing, and  yet  it  seemed  to  me  that  something 
was  going  to  happen. 

We  were  about  three  paces  from  each 
other.  By  stretching  our  arms  we  should 
have  been  able  to  touch  each  other's  hands. 

"Come,"  said  he. 

This  single  word  sufficed  to  put  an  end 
to  all  my  disquietude.  The  voice  was  very 
agreeable.  It  filled  me  with  a  gentle  emo- 
tion. At  the  same  time  I  became  as  free 
and  as  content  as  in  the  presence  of  a  very 
old  and  dearly  loved  friend.  It  seemed  to 
me  that  I  had  known  from  all  time  this 
unknown  of  a  moment  before.  I  found  that 
I  was  familiar  with  his  face,  his  manner, 
his  look,  his  voice,  his  mind,  his  very 
clothes.  An  irresistible  force  moved  me  to 
answer  him,  and  to  answer  him  in  these 
words :  — 

"I  follow  you,  my  friend." 

All   my   surprise   had   disappeared,    and, 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

although  I  was  perfectly  conscious  that  the 
adventure  was  singular,  I  was  in  such  a 
state  of  mind  that  I  did  not  feel  its  singu- 
larity. 

I  went  up  to  him.  He  took  my  arm,  and 
the  action  seemed  quite  natural.  Were 
we  not  old  friends?  Had  I  not  known 
him  since  I  was  three  or  four  years  old? 
Yes,  and  although  he  was  certainly  much 
older  than  I,  he  had  played  with  me  in  my 
cot.  All  this  settled  itself  clearly  in  my 
head.  I  repeat,  from  that  moment  until 
sunrise  the  next  morning,  that  is  to  say,  all 
the  time  I  spent  with  him,  I  had  not  one 
moment  of  astonishment.  What  happened, 
what  I  heard,  what  I  said,  the  unusual 
phenomena,  everything  seemed  to  me  to  be 
perfectly  in  place. 

So  I  went  up  to  him,  and,  when  his  arm 
was  passed  under  mine,  which  I  folded 
very  respectfully  and  with  a  lover's  joy,  a 
long  and  precious  conversation  began  be- 
tween us. 


42 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 
HE 

It  is  this  that  they  call  my  mother! 
They  are  full  of  such  good  intentions. 
Admit,  my  friend,  that  they  are  good 
people. 

I 

Very  good  people.  You  do  not  think 
your  mother  well  portrayed? 

HE 

I  have  had  so  many  mothers  that  this 
image  doubtless  resembles  one  of  the 
women  who  have  believed  that  they  gave 
birth  to  me;  it  is  their  innocence  that 
makes  me  smile,  their  virginal  conception 
of  maternity,  the  white  robe,  the  blue 
scarf.  And  yet,  this  church,  one  of  the 
ugliest  in  the  whole  world,  is  one  of  the 
least  puerile.  The  priests  who  serve  it  have 
preserved  some  intellectual  illusion.  They 
have  a  scrupulous  and  argumentative 
piety.  The  miracles  anciently  described 

43 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

seem  to  them  proved  by  their  very  an- 
tiquity. They  know  that  I  walked  on 
the  waters,  one  tempestuous  evening,  but, 
if  they  had  seen  the  windows  of  their 
church  on  fire  with  lights,  would  they  have 
believed  their  eyes?  You  saw,  you  be- 
lieved, and  you  came,  my  friend.  That 
light  shone  for  you  alone. 


Oh,  my  friend ! 


HE 


To  speak  to  mankind  I  need  a  man  as 
intermediary,  and  I  chose  you,  I  gave  you 
a  sign.  You  were  not  obliged  to  respond. 
My  power  is  not  such  as  to  compel  men's 
wills.  I  can  seduce;  but  I  cannot  com- 
mand. 

I 

I  was  greatly  surprised,  I  was  frightened, 
but  I  walked  as  if  to  happiness,  as  if  towards 
44 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

a  moment  of  love.    But  why  did  the  light 
go  out,  at  the  moment  when  I  came  near 


you? 


HE 


Because  your  curiosity  had  become  de- 
sire. No  longer  could  anything  stop  you. 
The  iron  was  on  its  way  towards  the  mag- 
net. Are  you  happy? 


I 


It  seems  to  me  that  my  life  is  being 
fulfilled;  it  seems  to  me  that  my  past 
days  were  only  a  preparation  for  the  present 
hour. 

HE 

Then  you  are  happy?  You  are  going 
to  be  much  more  so.  There  are  things 
of  which  mankind  have  always  appeared 
to  be  ignorant.  When  you  have  heard 
them  from  my  lips  you  will,  in  that 
moment,  have  received  the  courage  to 

45 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

repeat  them,  and  that  will  win  you  an 
eternal  glory,  a  glory  that  will  last  as 
long  as  the  earth  itself,  perhaps  as  long 
as  the  civilisation  of  which  you  are  a 
part. 

I 

Is  there  not  another  eternity,  a  true 
eternity? 

My  master  —  for  I  now  felt  that  this  old 
friend  was  my  master  still  more  than  my 
friend  —  my  master  was  kind  enough  to 
smile,  looking  at  me  with  tender  irony,  but 
he  did  not  answer  my  question. 

"Let  us  go,"  he  said,  after  a  moment's 
silence,  "and  walk  in  the  Luxembourg." 

I 

Not  really? 

This  time,  he  laughed  indeed.  He 
laughed  softly. 

We  walked  all  round  the  sombre  church, 
46 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

and  left  it  by  the  Rue  Palatine.  I  noticed 
that  he  took  no  holy  water,  and,  even,  as  I 
stretched  out  my  hand  towards  the  stone 
shell,  he  murmured: 

"Useless." 

It  was  now  night.  We  reached  the 
Rue  Servandoni  in  silence.  The  rare 
passengers  met  or  passed  us  without 
emotion,  without  curiosity.  A  young 
woman,  however,  who  was  coming  slowly 
down  the  street,  observed  my  companion 
with  eyes  that  seemed  on  fire.  Perhaps, 
if  he  had  been  alone,  she  would  have 
been  still  bolder.  An  idea,  madder  than 
the  young  woman's  glance,  crossed  my 
mind. 

"She  looked  at  you,"  I  said,  "as  if  she 
knew  you. " 

HE 

Everybody  recognises  me,  when  I  wish 
it.  That  young  woman  does  not  know 
who  I  am.  She  thinks  me  a  man  like 
other  men,  and  yet,  if  I  had  been  alone, 

47 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

her  glance  would  have  been  much  more 
lively,  for  she  desires  soft  words,  she 
desires  kisses.  But  what  would  be  her 
destiny,  if  I  yielded  to  her  mute  sym- 
pathy! The  women  whom  I  love  lose 
all  reasonable  notions  of  life,  and  I  have 
no  sooner  touched  their  hands,  caressed 
their  hair,  than  all  their^  flesh  weeps  with 
pleasure.  If  I  insist,  they  melt  like  figs 
in  my  sunlight.  Sweet  flavour  and  cruel! 
If  I  withdraw  myself  from  them  they  die 
of  grief,  and  if  I  stay  with  them  .they  die 
of  love. 

I 

The  mystics  have  said  something  of 
that. 

HE 

Something  of  it  they  have  shown,  but 
wrapped  in  the  withered  herbs  of  their 
piety. 

I 

Saint  Teresa  .  .  . 
48 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

She  believed  that  I  loved  her  with 
passion.  That  fatuity  made  me  leave 
her.  Hers  was  the  solidest  woman's  heart 
I  have  ever  met,  and  with  it  what 
facility  in  self-deceit.  She  really  thought 
she  died  in  my  arms:  I  was  far  away. 
However,  in  that  supreme  moment,  I 
consoled  her  with  a  thought,  for  she  had 
earned  it  by  her  constancy.  What  she 
wrote  herself  is  not  without  interest  for 
mankind,  but  the  priests,  who  set  them- 
selves to  excite  her  genius,  inspired  her 
with  many  follies,  such  as  her  vision  of 
hell.  I  shall  not  tell  you,  my  friend, 
who  are  the  women  I  have  most  loved. 
Scarcely  one  of  them  has  left  a  name 
among  you.  A  woman  who  is  loved  and 
loves  does  not  pass  her  time,  like  the  illus- 
trious Teresa,  in  describing  the  stations 
of  love.  She  lives  and  she  dies,  and  that 
is  all. 

While  I  was  considering  these  words, 
which  a  little  troubled  my  understanding, 

49 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

we  had  arrived  before  the  railing  of  the 
garden.  There  I  stopped,  observing  the 
sombre  drawing  of  the  great  naked  trees. 
Heavy  black  clouds  were  passing  in  the 
sky,  that  was  very  feebly  lit  by  an  invisible 
crescent  of  moon. 

"How  gloomy,"  I  said,  "is  this  park 
on  a  winter  evening,  and  gloomier  still 
through  these  bars." 

But  the  gate  opened  a  little  way,  and 
we  went  in.  I  had  seen  so  many  strange 
things,  heard  so  many  strange  words,  felt 
so  many  strange  emotions,  that  this  new 
miracle  gave  me  but  a  mediocre  surprise. 
We  were  in  the  garden. 

"Let  us  go,"  he  said,  "towards  the 
roses. " 

I 

Towards  the  rose-trees. 

HE 

Towards  the  roses. 
50 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

A  soft  and  clear  daylight  was  born  as 
we  advanced.  The  trees,  suddenly  in 
leaf,  the  chestnuts  blossoming  in  shafts  of 
white  and  red,  were  filled  with  the  songs 
of  birds.  Blackbirds,  on  the  topmost 
branches,  launched  their  shrill  calls.  Bees 
were  already  murmuring  by;  a  fly  settled 
on  my  hand. 

The  great  flower-bed  was  in  full  bloom. 
A  perfume  enveloped  me  with  a  precious 
sweetness.  We  disturbed  a  cat  that  was 
stalking  two  cooing  pigeons.  My  friend 
plucked  a  red  rose,  then  a  white,  then  a 
yellow.  At  this  moment  it  seemed  to  be 
five  o'clock  in  the  morning  of  a  beautiful 
summer  day. 


I  am  happy.   I  am  happy. 

HE 

Roses,  these  roses,  are  enough  to  make 
me  jealous  of  men.  The  rose  of  your  gar- 
dens, the  woman  of  your  civilisation,  these 

Si 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

are  two  creations  that  make  you  the  equals 
of  the  gods.  And  to  think  that  you  still 
regret  the  earthly  paradise!  Eve!  Eve, 
my  friend,  was  a  milkmaid,  the  pleasure 
of  a  bird-catcher  or  an  early-rising  oxherd. 
Eve,  when  you  have  all  these  real  young 
women  to  enchant  your  eyes  and  make  des- 
perate your  dreams! 

I 

She  was,  however,  a  divine  work.  Your 
father  .  .  . 

But  I  said  no  more,  trembling  with 
happiness.  Three  young  women  were 
coming  towards  us.  They  were  dressed 
in  white.  Delicate  garlands  of  flowers 
adorned  their  corn-coloured  hair.  They 
walked  slowly,  holding  each  other's  hands; 
their  smiles  made  a  light  within  the  light. 
At  the  sight  of  the  new  roses,  they  all  cried 
out  together  like  children,  and  stayed, 
stretching  their  arms  towards  the  rose-trees, 
timorous  and  troubled  by  desire. 

I  watched,  a  prisoner  of  the  spell,  but 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

my  friend,  with  the  ease  of  a  king,  made 
a  few  steps  towards  them,  and  offered 
them  the  roses  he  had  plucked.  They 
took  them,  blushing,  and  slipped  them 
into  their  girdles.  She  who  was  the 
tallest,  who  had  the  most  beautiful  hair, 
and  the  most  beautiful  eyes,  thanked  him 
with  a  smile  and  a  few  words,  and  then 
added  :  — 

"We  were  looking  for  you." 

HE 

They  say  that  when  one  looks  for  me,  he 
always  finds  me. 

Then     there     was     charming     laughter, 
laughter  that  made  my  heart  laugh. 

SHE 

How    beautiful    are    the    roses    on    this 
earth ! 

Oh!  I  love  this  big  red  one! 

53 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 
Take  it  for  your  hair,  my  friend. 

SHE 

I  am  happy. 

I  too  dared  to  pluck  a  rose. 

:'The  one  which  is  red  and  yellow,  the 
one  with  many  thorns,"  said  close  to 
me  the  voice  of  another  of  the  young 
women. 

She  had  rightly  divined  that  I  was  think- 
ing of  her. 

I 

The  one  that  makes  the  hands  bleed,  and 
the  heart,  perhaps. 

THE  OTHER 

Do  not  prick  your  fingers.  I  should  be 
wretched. 

I 

And  what  if  I  pricked  my  heart? 
54 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

She  lowered  her  eyes  without  answer- 
ing, took  the  rose  and  rejoined  her  com- 
panion. She  was  more  feminine,  more 
human.  She  who  had  my  friend's  favour 
seemed  of  a  higher  nature,  and  her  very 
childishnesses  could  not  but  be  divme. 

The   third   young   woman   was   not  for- 
gotten.    She   was    small    and   frail,    timid 
with   a   heaven  of  innocence  in  her  eyes 
She  did  not  leave  the  tallest,  whose  sister 
or  chosen  friend  she  seemed  to  be.    She  was 
not  forgotten;  but  she  disdained  the  flower 
I    meant    for    her,    and,    going    into    the 
flower-bed,  plucked  herself  a  whole  bouquet 
of   roses.     My    friend    observed    her   with 
complacency. 

HE 

Spoilt  child. 

THE  LITTLE  ONE 

I  have  them  of  all  colours.  For  me! 
For  me!  For  me! 

55 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

And  taking  them  one  after  another,  she 
inhaled  their  scent  with  a  selfish  delight. 

My  friend  walked  on  with  two  of  the 
young  women.  I  followed  him  with  the 
other,  with  her  who  seemed  to  have  chosen 
me. 

THE  OTHER 

Look!  Are  you  bleeding?  I  warned 
you. 

A  drop  of  blood  had  been  crushed  on 
my  finger.  I  looked  at  the  young  woman 
without  answering.  She  had  not  the  ironic 
air  of  which  I  suspected  her.  Reassured, 
I  came  up  to  her  again;  she  laid  her  hand 
on  my  arm. 

While  these  charming  scenes  were 
occurring,  I  was  adapting  myself  to  my 
singular  circumstances.  The  continua- 
tion of  the  adventure  soon  seemed  most 
natural.  We  were  walking  in  the  morn- 
ing in  a  beautiful,  solitary  and  flowery 
park.  Such  things  happen  in  life  as  well 
as  in  dreams,  and  I  was  soon  quite  at  my 
ease. 

56 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

We  were  now  walking  in  a  wood  of 
young  chestnuts.  Red  stalks  fell  now 
and  again  at  our  feet.  We  went  down 
steps  and  climbed  others;  we  saw  ponds 
and  pools,  stone  statues  and  orange-trees, 
a  cyclop  and  the  nakedness  of  a  nymph, 
flowers  of  every  colour,  trees  of  all  forms, 
bushes  of  all  leaves,  and  pigeons  which, 
with  slanting  flight,  dropped  on  the 
lawns  amid  the  fluttering  of  startled 
sparrows. 

THE  OTHER 

My  name?  What  an  idea!  You  will 
learn  it  if  you  are  destined  to  know  it.  It 
is  not  mysterious.  Call  me  friend;  for  this 
day,  I  will  permit  you  to  do  so. 

I 

Are  we  to  have  a  whole  day? 

THE  OTHER 

Does  a  day  seem  long  to  you? 

57 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

Long  and  short  at  the  same  time  in  your 
company. 

THE  OTHER 

You  will  see  that  it  will  be  short. 

I 

Alas! 

THE  OTHER 

Where  are  they?  I  have  lost  sight  of 
them.  Ah.  There  they  are.  Yonder, 
under  the  cherry-tree  in  bloom. 


THE  OTHER 
What  do  you  mean? 

I 

Her  name? 
58 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

THE  OTHER 

She?  She  is  SHE,  she  is  life,  she  is 
youth,  she  is  beauty,  she  is  love.  She! 

I 

I  ask  nothing  further.    I  am  happy. 

THE  OTHER 

Already? 

I 

I  am  happy,  and  I  still  desire,  but 
without  anxiety.  I  desire  with  delight, 
with  calm.  I  feel  a  divine  peace,  a  peace 
full  of  present  pleasures  and  of  pleasures 
to  come. 

THE  OTHER 

With  him  one  is  always  happy,  one  be- 
comes accustomed  to  one's  happiness,  and 
yet  one  feels  it  continually  increase.  I  said 
"already."  Do  not  interpret  that  word 
according  to  your  ideas  of  yesterday. 

59 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 


None  the  less,  it  gave  me  something  to 
dream  of. 

She  lowered  her  eyes,  as  she  had 
lowered  them  before,  without  confusion, 
with  more  than  human  coquetry.  When 
her  eyelids  lifted,  slowly,  it  seemed  to  me 
that  I  saw  in  her  look  a  dawn  of  tender- 
ness. She  took  my  hand  and  hurried  me 
along. 

THE  OTHER 

Come  quickly,  they  are  waiting  for  us. 

Under  a  green  arbour,  rustic  chairs  were 
arranged  round  a  heavy  table  of  axe-hewn 
wood.  A  bowl  of  milk,  cups  of  flowers, 
brown  bread,  strawberries;  it  was  Vir- 
gilian.  The  little  one  spread  the  petals  of 
a  red  rose  on  the  milk  into  which  she  was 
dropping  the  strawberries. 

THE  LITTLE  ONE 

They  are  my  lips.    I  give  you  my  kisses. 
60 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

She  blushed  deeply  as  she  said  it,  and 
her  big  friend  drew  her  into  her  arms  and 
kissed  her  eyes. 

When  we  had  begun  to  take  this  matu- 
tinal repast,  my  friend,  taking  no  further 
notice  of  the  young  women,  renewed  the 
conversation  their  arrival  had  interrupted. 
We  were  seated  facing  each  other,  two  of 
our  companions  together  on  one  side,  and 
on  the  other  the  little  one,  who  was  busied 
in  arranging  according  to  their  shades  all 
kinds  of  flowers  that  she  had  picked  in  the 
course  of  the  walk. 

HE 

My  father  .  .  .  You  were  speaking  of 
my  father.  I  am  afraid  you  have  an  exag- 
gerated idea  of  him.  He  was  certainly  very 
powerful,  fairly  intelligent,  just,  but,  admit 
it,  he  was  not  good  .  .  . 


You  speak  as  if  he  no  longer  existed. 

61 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

He  is  not  dead,  but  he  is  old.  The  gods 
end  by  growing  old.  He  has  retired  into 
the  eternal  silence  of  disabused  intellects. 
He  still  gives  advice,  he  alone  is  capable 
of  explaining  certain  human  evolutions, 
but  the  indifference  of  age  has  dried 
up  his  heart.  He  has  never  much  loved 
mankind,  and  now  has  turned  from 
them  entirely.  I,  on  the  other  hand,  love 
them  .  .  . 

I 
Lord.  .  .  . 

I  rose,  to  fall  on  my  knees.  He  calmed 
my  emotion  with  a  gesture. 

HE 

Why  "Lord"?  I  am  not  your  lord. 
Listen  to  me,  and  reassure  yourself.  Ob- 
serve these  beautiful  young  women,  their 
quiet,  and  their  smiles.  They  play  with 
flowers,  they  watch  you  with  amused  eyes: 
are  you  afraid  of  them?  And  yet,  would 

62 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

you  not  say  that  they  were  goddesses  ?  Ah ! 
How  your  women  are  nearer  than  you  men 
to  nature,  nearer  to  the  divine!  If  you  had 
had  a  mistress,  I  should  have  asked  you  to 
go  and  fetch  her:  she  would  have  looked 
at  me  without  timidity. 

The  young  women  began  to  laugh. 
All  three  were  now  on  the  same  side  of 
the  table,  and,  as  they  leaned  over  their 
scented  harvest,  murmuring  like  bees, 
stirring  like  lilies  where  the  wind  passes, 
one  did  not  know  if  they  were  listening  to 
the  words  of  the  master  or  to  the  words  of 
the  flowers. 

This  spectacle  helped  to  reassure  me, 
after  my  friend's  sayings,  which,  however, 
I  did  not  understand. 

HE 

The  religious  conception  of  the  world 
that  you  now  have,  the  conception  that 
you  call  Christian,  from  the  name  that 
was  given  me  on  the  occasion  of  one  of 

63 


A  -NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

my  earthly  visits,  is  one  of  the  feeblest 
that  humanity  has  ever  imagined.  Prac- 
tical intelligence  has,  in  a  certain  sense, 
made  progress  since  the  Greek  philoso- 
phers before  Socrates,  but  speculative  in- 
telligence has  almost  consistently  gone 
backward.  To  make  a  system  that  should 
have  some  distant  relation  to  the  truth, 
the  cinematic  philosophy  of  Epicurus 
would  have  to  be  poured  into  the  fables 
of  pagan  mythology.  Take,  if  you  like, 
if  Latin  thought  is  more  familiar  to 
you,  the  poem  of  Lucretius,  and  Ovid's 
"Metamorphoses";  attempt  an  interpre- 
tation which  should  derive  part  from 
universal  determinism,  and  part  from 
divine  caprice.  ...  It  is  difficult?  Why? 
Are  not  men  apt  in  appearance  to  initia- 
tive, though  ruled,  as  you  know,  and 
very  narrowly,  by  fatal  physical  laws? 
You  are  free,  when  you  think -yourselves 
free.  It  is  the  same  with  the  gods,  but 
the  liberty  of  the  gods  is  exercised  on 
a  very  much  more  extensive  material,  a 
material  which,  without  being  infinite 
64 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

(infinity  does  not  exist),  is  immense. 
Their  power,  superior  though  it  is,  is 
of  the  same  order  as  human  power. 
Greece  touched  the  knot  of  the  question, 
and,  if  she  did  not  untie  it,  it  is  that  it  is 
not  to  be  untied:  the  creator  of  the 
world,  the  regulator  of  the  world,  is 
Destiny.  Fatality  rules  over  the  gods,  as 
the  gods  rule  over  men,  and  under  her 
hand,  my  friend,  we  are  all  equal,  exactly 
as  you  are  under  death,  genii,  kings,  and 
beggars  alike. 

To  dissimulate  the  trouble  into  which 
these  words  threw  me,  I  turned  towards  the 
young  women.  There  were  but  two  of 
them. 

SHE 

The  little  one  has  gone  off  to  look  for 
more  flowers.  Some  of  them  fade  so 
quickly.  One  would  say  that  the  warmth 
of  the  earth  is  enough  to  dry  them  up. 

THE  OTHER 

How  many  times  love  has  been  killed  by 
kisses. 

65 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

Do  not  say  so,  my  friend;  that  was  not 
love,  but  caprice. 

THE  OTHER 

Caprice  and  love  hide  under  the  same 
dress. 

I  wanted  to  lay  my  hand  on  hers.  She 
took  it  away,  and  I  had  but  a  finger,  but  I 
pressed  it  unresisted. 

THE  LITTLE  ONE 
Here  are  other  flowers. 

THE  OTHER 

They  will  fade  too. 

HE 

No,  they  will  not  fade. 

THE  LITTLE  ONE 

There,  you  see. 

I 

I  have  needed  this  diversion,  my  friend, 
to  accustom  myself  to  your  discourse. 
66 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

Yes,  you  are  a  man,  and  such  you  will 
remain.  It  is  necessary  that  you  should 
remain  a  man. 


Shall  I  not  become  superior  to  other 
men,  when  I  have  heard,  when  I  have 
understood  ? 

HE 
Yes,  if  you  understand. 


The  Christian  phase,  then,  has  been  an 
error  of  humanity? 

HE 

Humanity  has  never  lived  but  in  error, 
and,  besides,  there  is  no  truth,  since  the 
world  is  perpetually  changing.  You  have 
acquired  the  notion  of  evolution,  which, 

67 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

within  certain  limits,  is  correct,  but  you 
have  wished  at  the  same  time  to  preserve 
the  notion  of  truth:  that  is  contradictory. 
If  you  were  to  succeed  in  constructing, 
in  your  intellect,  a  true  image  of  the 
world,  it  would  be  already  untrue  for 
your  grandchildren.  For,  if  the  world 
evolves,  you  likewise  evolve,  and  man, 
from  one  generation  to  another,  is  not 
the  same  man.  You  ceaselessly  struggle 
to  find  the  likeness  of  the  old  man  in  the 
portrait  of  the  child.  It  is  a  game.  After 
all,  it  is  something  for  you  to  do. 


Yes,  the  search  for  truth  is  one  of  the 
great  occupations  of  men.  One  is  held 
happy  when  one  has  found  it;  and,  if  one 
is  unable  to  find  it  oneself,  one  shares  in 
a  neighbour's  discovery.  The  neighbour 
never  refuses.  This  need  of  truth  torments 
men  about  the  time  that  their  carnal  pas- 
sions let  them  rest. 

68 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

Nature  was  cruel  in  allowing  her  crea- 
tures to  survive  the  period  of  physical  ex- 
pansion. But  of  this  very  cruelty  you  have 
taken  advantage,  and  I  think  that  many  old 
men  among  you  are  happier  than  many  of 
the  young.  In  Truth,  at  last,  they  find  a 
faithful  mistress. 

As  he  said  this,  I  could  not  prevent  my- 
self from  glancing  at  the  young  woman 
whom  I  have  called  "The  Other."  She 
looked  at  me,  too,  but  lowered  her  eyes, 
blushing. 

HE 

I  cannot  modify  even  for  an  instant 
the  form  of  your  human  brain,  the  habits 
of  your  understanding.  That  is  why  I 
enter  into  all  your  fantasies  of  language, 
and  use  even  your  abstract  words.  Do 
not  let  that  dupe  you.  It  is  not  ap- 
proval. Truth  is  an  illusion,  and  illusion 
is  a  truth. 

69 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 


None  the  less,  your  presence  here,  your 
words  .  .  . 

HE 

You  will  no  longer  believe  in  me  when 
you  no  longer  see  me,  and  you  will  never 
know  if  this  night,  this  winter  night, 
clear  and  warm  as  a  summer  morning, 
if  this  night  of  happiness  was  a  truth 
or  an  illusion. 

It  seemed  to  me,  for  the  space  of  less 
than  a  second,  that  the  whole  spectacle 
before  me  went  back  into  the  nothingness 
of  dreams,  but  my  eyes,  that  I  had  not 
closed,  found  the  light  again,  and  I  was 
comforted. 

HE 

I  shall,  then,  not  tell  you  the  truth, 
because  no  concordance  is  possible  be- 
tween your  mind,  served  by  your  senses, 
and  that  which  is  outside  your  senses. 

70 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

There  is  a  representation;  it  is  inexact,  be- 
cause it  is  fragmentary  and  momentary. 
A  few  little  cubes  of  mosaic  have  fallen 
from  the  vault;  you  put  them  in  the 
palm  of  your  hand,  you  set  their  tints  side 
by  side,  and  you  believe  you  have  recon- 
structed the  drama  of  the  world.  I  shall 
not  tell  you  the  truth;  I  shall  tell  you  what 
you  wish  to  know.  When  you  know  it,  you 
will  know  no  more  of  it,  but  you  will  be 
satisfied. 

I 

Master  of  enigmas  and  of  parables  .  .  . 

HE 

The  gospels,  my  gospels!  Poor  and 
happy  books!  What  a  strange  fate  had 
these  pious  dreams  of  some  Jews  disturbed  ' 
by  drunken  prophets!  Imposture  has  made 
in  them  such  naive  arabesques  with  faith! 
Have  you  read  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles? 
It  is  not  as  good  as  "Aladdin  and  the 
Marvellous  Lamp,"  but  how  moving  it 

71 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

is!  These  men  touch  God  with  their 
hands.  And  it  is  pastoral  and  fairy 
tale  at  once.  It  is  a  pantheism  of  in- 
genuous conjurors.  Behold  me  a  car- 
penter, a  fisherman,  a  prophet,  a  magician; 
I  am  hanged  and  buried;  I  am  resus- 
citated and  mount  to  heaven;  thence  I 
re-descend  in  the  form  of  tongues  of  fire. 
I  am  one,  I  am  two,  I  am  three;  I 
am  a  dove,  I  am  a  lamb,  I  am  God,  and 
all  at  once.  And  the  nations  understand; 
the  doctors  explain.  Everybody  believes. 
Truth  reigns.  Happiness  is  poured  into 
pacified  hearts. 

I 
Is  not  that  what  you  intended? 

HE 

Jesus,  whom  I  inspired  with  some  ele- 
mentary ideas,  made  a  mistake  in  taking 
twelve  disciples.  He  would  have  done 
wrong  to  take  a  single  one.  My  ideas, 

72 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

falling  into  these  twelve  heads,  became 
twelve  different  kinds  of  folly.  It  was 
then  that  I  interested  myself  in  Paul. 
It  was  too  late.  Besides,  I  abandoned 
him  almost  at  once.  None  the  less,  the 
Church  that  he  founded  has  become  a 
curious  institution. 

I 

Men  have  thought  it  divine. 

HE 

For  nearly  twenty  centuries  I  have 
watched  with  sorrow  its  ironical  devel- 
opment. It  has  made  me  curse,  it  has  made 
me  scorn  .  .  . 

I 

It  has  also  made  you  love. 

HE 

With  what  love!  Ah!  my  beautiful 
feast-days  of  Ephesus  and  Corinth! 

73 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

What  are  you  saying? 

HE 

You  hear  in  this  moment  the  confession 
of  a  god.  A  moment  unique  in  your 
life,  and  rare  in  the  life  of  humanity. 
Take  the  hand  of  your  friend,  and  carry 
it  to  your  lips.  You  will  listen  to  me  more 
wisely  if  your  heart  is  at  peace.  Call  her 
Elise;  she  will  answer  your  smile  with  a 
smile. 

I  obeyed  with  joy.  Elise  let  me  take  her 
hand,  and  I  tenderly  kissed  it.  Her  friend 
watched  us  with  an  air  of  kindly  complicity. 
Delightful  betrothal! 


I 
I  love  you,  Elise.   Do  you  love  me? 

ELISE 

I  love  you,  my  friend.    But  give  me  my 
hand    again,    that    I    may    arrange    these 
74 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

flowers  for  the  feast-day  of  our  hearts.  Let 
us  listen  to  our  master  and  be  wise. 

I  let  fall  Elise's  hand,  after  kissing  it  once 
more.  A  very  sweet  smile  thanked  me,  and 
I  saw,  under  the  white  robe,  her  bosom 
swell  with  love. 

The  little  one,  tired  of  running  about, 
had  sat  down  on  a  low  chair,  leaning  her 
head  against  the  knees  of  her  comrade,  who, 
absently,  was  playing  with  her  yellow  hair. 
My  master,  his  eyes  on  this  charming  pic- 
ture, whose  emotion  he  seemed  to  make 
his  own,  said  nothing.  After  several  mo- 
ments of  a  silence  that  enriched  my  life,  he 
spoke  again  :  — 

HE 

If  I  have  sometimes  come  to  visit  men, 
it  has  been  for  love  of  their  women.  Not 
that,  like  the  gods  whose  stories  are  writ- 
ten by  the  poets,  I  desire  a  multiplicity  of 
embraces.  I  come  less  to  love  than  to  let 
myself  be  loved.  I  belong  to  those  who 

75 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

wish  to  make  me  theirs,  and  I  make  myself 
for  their  hearts  the  ideal  man  whom  earth 
refuses  them. 

For  you  have  created  woman,  you  men, 
and  you  have  remained  inferior  to  your 
creation.  You  have  not  known  how  to 
acquire  the  gifts  that  would  have  com- 
pleted the  miracle,  and  your  loves  are 
always  lame.  You  take,  and  you  do  not 
give;  you  impoverish  the  fields  that  are 
fertilised  by  your  desire,  and  the  women 
you  have  loved  die  of  thirst  as  they  look 
at  the  dryness  of  your  eyes. 

All  three  were  listening,  very  atten- 
tively. Elise,  however,  was  good  enough 
to  take  my  fingers  and  press  them,  while 
her  two  friends  rose,  and  were  going  to 
kiss  the  hand  of  the  master.  But  he 
opened  his  arms,  and  they  fell  on  his 
breast  as  fall  two  flowers  plucked  by  the 
wind.  Elise  and  I  watched  with  pleasure 
this  charming  episode,  and  I  said  to  my- 
self, naively:  "He  welcomes  these  two 
women  as  he  would  have  welcomed  all 

76 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

women,  and  I  understand  that  he  can 
belong  at  the  same  time  to  all  at  once  and 
to  each  one  in  particular."  Elise's  hand, 
meanwhile,  began  to  grow  restless  in  mine. 
She  said  in  a  whisper  and  unevenly,  these 
enigmatic  words:  — 

ELISE 

Friend,  friend,  are  we  not  more  beauti- 
ful than  women? 

Yes,  Elise  was  more  beautiful  than  a 
woman.  I  thought  I  was  looking  at  a 
divinity.  I  thought  I  was  becoming  a  god. 
My  mouth  took  possession  of  her  mouth, 
and  my  left  arm  supported  her  head, 
while  my  right  hand  sought  under  the 
agitation  of  her  bosom  the  beating  of  the 
heart  that  I  desired.  It  became  dark 
night  except  in  my  head  and  in  my  senses, 
and  it  seemed  to  me  that  Elise  was  mine, 
and  that  cries  left  our  moist  and  trembling 
mouths.  But  perhaps  it  was  only  an  illu- 
sion. And  yet,  I  perfectly  remember  that, 

77 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

when  the  light  came  back,  our  eyes  were 
full  of  gratitude  and  of  understanding. 
Moreover,  we  were  now  so  close  to  one 
another  that  we  seemed  but  a  single  body. 

Insensibly  we  recovered  our  former  atti- 
tudes. The  little  one,  when  once  more  we 
looked  at  the  external  world,  was  sleeping 
on  her  friend's  knees,  and  our  master  was 
meditating,  his  head  on  his  hand.  What 
had  passed  before  us,  what  mysterious  ac- 
complishment, I  did  not  then  think  of  ask- 
ing myself,  and  now,  if  I  were  to  ask,  I 
should  not  know  what  to  answer.  Illusion 
had  doubtless  buried  us  all  alike  in  a  rain 
of  roses,  and  the  magician  had  not  escaped 
his  own  magic. 

The  great  happiness  I  felt  quickened  my 
intelligence.  When  our  master  began  to 
speak  again,  I  felt  that  a  soft  beam  of  sun- 
light was  falling  upon  me. 

HE 

I  told  you  that  the  religion  of  the 
ancient  Greeks  was  that  which  translated 
with  least  ugliness  and  least  falsity  the 

78 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

true  state  of  the  world  which  is  invisible 
to  you.  There  are  gods,  that  is  to  say,  a 
race  of  men  as  superior  to  other  men  as 
you  are  superior  to  the  most  intelligent 
or  the  best  domesticated  animals.  You 
have  conquered  the  earth;  my  ancestors 
conquered  space,  and  colonised  the  greater 
number  of  the  planets  that  gravitate  round 
the  sun.  Our  possible  domain  does  not 
extend  beyond  the  solar  system;  our  actual 
domain  does  not  stretch  beyond  Jupiter, 
where  my  father  dwells,  and  its  limit 
in  the  direction  of  the  sun  is  this  earth 
upon  which  we  are.  For  a  great  num- 
ber of  centuries  I  have  chosen  Mars  as  a 
resting-place,  and  this  brought  me  near 
you,  and  gave  me  certain  humane  in- 
clinations. The  other  planets,  by  reason 
either  of  their  distance  from  or  of  their 
nearness  to  the  sun,  are  inaccessible  to 
me,  almost  as  much  so  as  to  yourselves. 
I  do  not  know  what  goes  on  in  them.  As 
for  the  infinite  worlds  which  are  spread 
beyond  our  sphere,  they  are  for  me  as  for 
you  the  unknown  and  the  unknowable. 

79 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

What  I  have  just  told  you  will  not 
seem  very  new.  Many  of  your  philos- 
ophers have  had  imaginations  that  at  some 
point  touched  this  truth.  Voltaire  made 
Micromegas  to  tease  you;  but,  submit- 
ting to  the  appearances  of  physical  laws, 
he  made  an  immoderate  giant  of  him. 
Why  so?  Are  not  the  ants,  next  to 
men,  the  most  intelligent  of  terrestrial 
animals?  I  think  I  remember  that  at 
a  far-distant  epoch,  that  your  geologists 
call,  I  believe,  the  coal  age,  the  termites 
displayed  on  your  globe  a  sort  of  genius. 
These  little  beings,  so  fragile,  were  cut 
short  in  their  development  by  the  lower- 
ing of  the  temperature.  They  no  longer 
live  but  with  a  slackened  vitality,  like 
other  insects;  their  intelligence,  no  longer 
nourished  by  an  abundant  physical  activ- 
ity, has  congealed;  they  stopped  at  a 
point  thenceforth  impassable  for  them, 
and  what  they  once  accomplished  by 
choice  and  will,  they  now  no  longer  do 
except  mechanically.  But  let  us  leave 
Micromegas  .  .  . 

80 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

Micromegas  has  almost  ceased  to  in- 
terest us.  You  have  said,  a  little  quickly 
for  my  intelligence,  many  things  that 
would  delight  me  if  I  better  understood 
them.  This  slackened  life  .  .  . 

HE 

Terrestrial  life  is  precarious  since  it  is 
at  the  mercy  of  atmospherical  circum- 
stances. Animals  that  have  not  a  very 
high  temperature  are  destined  to  expend 
their  strength  in  a  perpetual  labour  of 
adaptation.  If  the  original  heat  had  in- 
creased instead  of  diminishing,  the  ter- 
mites and  the  ants  would  perhaps  be  two 
great  nations,  sharing  between  them  the 
empire  of  the  world,  and  man  would  be 
one  of  their  preys.  But  you  discovered 
the  art  of  fire  and  raised  yourself  above 
all  other  animals.  Fire,  in  giving  you  a 
constant  summer,  also  gave*  you  leisure. 
Thence  your  civilisations,  proud  daughters 
of  idleness,  who  deny  their  mother.  It  is 

81 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

from  idleness  that  everything  has  been 
born  among  men.  From  the  year  in 
which  one  of  your  ancestors  was  able  to 
pass  the  winter  beside  his  fire,  date  the  arts, 
the  sciences,  games,  love,  all  delights. 
Leisure  is  indeed  the  greatest  and  the 
most  beautiful  of  man's  conquests.  But, 
though  you  have  known  how  to  conquer, 
though  you  have  known  how  to  create, 
you  have  scarcely  ever  known  how  to 
use  your  conquests  or  your  creations. 
After  conquering  leisure,  you  disdained 
it,  and  slaves,  ashamed  of  the  inactivity 
of  their  domesticated  hands,  set  them- 
selves to  preach  among  you  the  sanctity 
of  labour.  Poor  madmen!  And  are 
you  not  already  on  the  way  to  spoil 
woman?  Have  you  not  already  suc- 
ceeded in  insinuating  into  her  heart  the 
shameful  principles  of  Jewish  morality? 
Have  you  not  resolved,  in  your  narrow 
masculine  pride,  to  undo  the  work  of 
your  ancestors  and  to  reduce  to  the  posi- 
tion of  mean  and  lesser  men  these  crea- 
tures who  used  to  dominate  you  with  all 
82 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

their  beauty  and  with  all  their  tenderness? 
You  educate  them;  you  teach  them  the 
useless  stupidities  that  make  your  own 
brains  ugly;  soon  you  will  forbid  them 
ornament,  you  will  forbid  them  love,  you 
will  forbid  them  to  make  you  happy! 
But  I  will  take  up  this  discourse  later. 
It  is  a  digression  due  to  your  curiosity. 
We  were  speaking  of  Micromegas.  Well, 
I  am,  if  you  will,  Micromegas,  reduced 
to  our  human  proportions.  No  more  than 
he  have  I  absolute  power  over  men;  I 
cannot  even  crush  them,  like  that  Titan,  in 
absent-mindedness  or  in  pleasure.  I  have 
scarcely  any  power  over  men:  I  can,  when 
I  strongly  wish  it,  insinuate  into  them 
some  few  of  my  ideas.  It  is  this  that  men 
have  called  my  incarnations.  I  have  never 
become  incarnate.  My  own  flesh,  almost 
immortal,  and  almost  incorruptible,  suffices 
me. 


Almost  .  .  . 

83 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

The  gods  are  born  and  die,  so  my 
father  has  told  me.  I  have  not  seen  one 
die,  I  have  not  seen  one  born.  But  I 
was  born,  since  I  have  a  father  and  a 
mother. 

I 

Your  mother  Mary  .  .  . 

HE 

Credulous  and  inattentive  child!  What 
matter  the  successive  names  that  are  given 
us  by  men?  The  Greeks  called  my  mother 
Latona;  they  knew  me  under  the  name 
of  Apollo.  Their  religion  was  full  of 
fables,  but  they  were  not  ignorant  of 
the  essence  of  things.  I  know  nothing 
of  how  the  elementary  truths  were  re- 
vealed to  them.  Perhaps  my  father,  in 
primitive  ages  ...  I  did  not  begin  to 
busy  myself  with  men  until  about  the 
time  of  Pythagoras.  I  inspired  him  with 
some  happy  ideas;  he  passed  for  divine, 

84 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

and  is  one  of  the  rare  disciples  for  whom 
I  have  never  had  to  blush.  Pythagoras 
civilised  the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean. 
His  thought,  sustained  by  me,  hovered  like 
a  light  white  cloud  over  the  blue  waves  of 
that  maternal  sea. 

But  Epicurus  was  perhaps  still  nearer 
to  my  heart.  His  natural  and  more  genial 
sensibility  produced,  under  my  breath,  a 
more  beautiful  intellectual  flower.  He 
knew  one  part  of  wisdom,  and  was  not 
the  dupe  of  analogies.  Intelligent,  he 
did  not  go  and  suppose  a  universal  in- 
telligence, inventing  systems,  poems,  and 
useful  practices  for  the  happiness  of  man; 
he  did  not  go  and  suppose  a  supreme  crea- 
tor. He  understood  that  the  temperaments 
of  men  are  diverse,  and  did  not  advise  a 
uniform  pleasure.  He  taught  pleasure, 
that  is  to  say  the  art  of  being  happy 
according  to  one's  nature.  I  loved 
Epicurus.  I  showed  myself  to  him  in 
the  form  of  an  older  friend,  a  traveller 
who  wandered  over  the  world  in  search 
of  wisdom.  Once  or  twice  a  year,  he 

85 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

saw  me  arrive  with  joy,  put  his  slaves  at 
my  orders,  did  not  hide  from  me  his 
wife,  who  for  a  long  time  was  pretty,  and 
for  whom  I  felt  a  tender  friendship.  She 
was  only  jealous  of  her  husband's  tender- 
ness, and  never  prevented  him  from  en- 
joying the  caresses  of  a  beautiful  stranger. 
She  herself  was  insensible  neither.to  Ionian 
nor  to  Asiatic  beauty,  and  this  pure  and 
charming  couple  often  partook  of  pleasures 
that  they  did  not  give  to  each  other.  I 
accepted  these  voluptuous  customs;  the 
indulgent  night  more  than  once  heard 
our  sighs  mingle  with  those  of  the  sea 
which  came  to  break  its  perfumed  waves 
at  our  feet. 

These  things  occurred  at  the  hour  when 
the  young  slaves  came,  before  going  to 
sleep,  to  wash  away  on  the  beach  the 
stains  of  the  day's  work.  They  played, 
they  laughed,  and  we  loved  to  join  them 
in  the  water,  still  warm  from  the  fires  of 
the  afternoon.  Tired  by  a  long  philo- 
sophical talk,  we  found  a  singular  refresh- 
ment in  the  caresses  of  the  waves,  and  a 

86 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

strength  that  we  willingly  abandoned  in 
the  arms  of  the  young  women.  Then 
they  came  and  sat  beside  us  on  the  sand, 
and  sang,  while  we  dreamed  of  nature 
increate.  These  songs  did  not  fail  to 
attract  an  ardent  youth;  we  knew  it, 
and  when  we  were  rested  and  refreshed, 
we  went  and  stretched  ourselves  upon 
our  mats,  letting  new  pleasures  be  born, 
new  flowers,  in  place  of  those  we  had 
plucked. 

My  friend,  the  teachers  who  poison 
your  sensibility  and  stifle  your  intelligence 
have  made  you  believe  for  some  centuries 
past  that  the  pleasure  of  Epicurus  was  a 
pleasure  wholly  spiritual.  Epicurus  had 
too  much  wisdom  to  disdain  any  kind  of 
pleasure.  He  wished  to  know,  and  he 
knew,  all  enjoyments  that  may  become 
human  enjoyments;  he  abused  nothing 
but  made  use  of  everything  in  his  har- 
monious life. 

It  was  during  the  early  hours  of  one  of 
those  happy  evenings  that  we  found,  a 
result  of  long  meditations,  of  long  dis- 

87 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

cussions,  the  atomic  system.  It  was  a  great 
intellectual  achievement,  the  greatest 
that  has  ever  been  produced  among  you 
or  outside  your  sphere.  To  conceive  the 
world  as  the  product  of  a  series  of  acci- 
dents, that  is  to  say  of  a  series  of  facts  re- 
bdunding  to  infinity  one  on  another,  is  a 
conclusion  at  which  the  noblest  minds 
of  your  time  dare  hardly  stop,  although 
it  attracts  them.  Twenty  centuries  of 
Platonism  have  so  deranged  man's  un- 
derstanding that  the  simple  truths  no 
longer  find  a  footing  in  it.  And  yet,  all 
the  systems  that  you  have  imagined  can 
be  disproved,  and  that  of  Epicurus  can- 
not. Would  you  like  me  to  explain  it  to 
you,  not  as  your  professors  of  philosophy 
have  defaced  it,  but  as  we  established  it  in 
our  Ionian  evenings? 


I 


We      scarcely     know      the     system     of 
Epicurus  but  by  Lucretius'  poem  .  .  . 
88 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

The  most  beautiful,  perhaps,  of  the  works 
of  men  .  .  .  Ah!  if  men  had  chosen  for 
Bible  that  admirable  book! 

I 

Ought  we  to  recognise  in  it  a  little  of 
your  thought? 

HE 

Much,  my  friend,  much.  It  was  I  who 
guided  the  young  Lucretius  towards 
Zeno,  from  whose  mouth  he  learnt  to  love 
and  understand  our  Epicurus.  I  found 
again  in  this  sombre  Roman  genius  some- 
thing of  the  voluptuous  habit  of  mind  that 
ennobled  Epicurus,  a  similar  desire  of 
knowledge,  and  at  the  same  time  a  respect 
for  the  secret  movements  of  life.  His 
existence  would  have  been  that  of  a 
dreamer,  if  the  future  had  not  tormented 
him  with  his  passions.  He  was  loved,  and 
was  persecuted  by  jealousy,  he,  who  asked 

89 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

nothing  from  his  mistress  but  peace  for 
his  flesh  and  peace  for  his  thought.  He 
loved.  Love  made  an  observer  of  the 
dreamer.  He  wished  to  learn  the  cause  of 
love,  and  learnt  that  love  was  life  itself; 
he  wished  to  learn  the  cause  of  life, 
and  learnt  that  life,  that  is  to  say  eter- 
nal movement,  was  its  own  cause.  The 
great  adventures  of  ambition  that  he 
witnessed  also  did  much  to  detach  him 
from  social  pleasures.  The  actions  of 
animals,  so  simple,  so  precise,  seemed  to 
him  more  interesting  than  the  bloody  com- 
bats of  a  few  madmen  who  bought  by  a 
crime  the  certainty  of  dying  by  a  crime. 
At  the  time  when  he  wrote  his  poem,  I 
was  almost  his  only  guest  at  his  villa 
Lucretia,  not  far  from  Albanum.  It  was 
a  farm  rather  than  a  pleasure-house,  and 
often,  returning  from  a  walk,  we  lent  a 
hand  in  the  harvest  or  the  vintage. 
Memmius,  if  he  was  there,  watched  us 
or  played  with  the  girls.  Memmius  was 
a  mundane  sage  and  rather  libertine.  In 
the  evening  we  took  up  our  talk  again. 
90 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I  revealed  to  him  in  their  entirety  the 
mysteries  that  Zeno,  very  jealous,  had  half 
hidden  from  him.  On  my  next  visit  he 
read  me  the  last  pages  of  the  poem,  and  I 
recognised  with  joy  in  this  language,  less 
supple  but  more  solid  than  the  Greek, 
the  ideas  and  the  genius  of  the  noble 
Epicurus:  "Ancestress  of  the  Romans, 
O  joy  of  men  and  gods,  noble  Venus, 
it  is  thou  who,  under  the  vault  of 
heaven  where  the  stars  revolve,  dost 
people  the  ship-carrying  sea  and  the  fruit- 
bearing  earth;  to  thee  all  that  has  life 
owes  its  birth  and  its  sight  of  the  light  of 
the  sun  . 


"At  thy  coming,  O  goddess,  the  winds 
take  flight,  and  the  clouds  retire  .  .  . 

HE 

"For  thee  the  earth  scatters  the  scent  of 
her  flowers,  for  thee  laugh  the  waves  of 
the  deep  ..." 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

Lucretius    is    now    but    lightly  valued 

among  men.    He  is  held  immoral,  having 

spoken  of  love  without  hypocrisy  and  of 
death  without  illusions. 


HE 

Yes,  he  knew  too  many  things  wound- 
g  to  your  childish  sensibility. 


I 

I  remember  a  sentence  of  Bossuet,  a  sen- 
tence that  implies  a  scorn  of  antiquity: 
"As  soon  as  the  cross  began  to  appear  in 
this  world,  all  that  men  used  to  adore  on 
the  earth  was  buried  in  oblivion.  The 
world  opened  its  eyes  and  was  astonished  at 
its  ignorance  ..." 

HE 

And  it  is  I!  It  is  I!  So  many  absurdities 
in  my  name!  .  .  .  But  our  young  women 
have  fallen  asleep,  their  hair  mingled 

92 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

with  the  flowers  they  were  arranging. 
Let  them  be.  Take  away  these  lilacs 
which  would  give  them  headaches.  O 
divine  creatures,  you  know  all,  knowing 
love,  and  you  have  no  need  of  our  vain 
philosophies.  • 

He  rose,  and,  walking  round  the  table, 
kissed  all  three  upon  the  cheek.  Then  he 
sat  down  again  beside  me,  and  spoke: 

HE 

I  shall  not  tell  you  what  matter  is;  I  do 
not  know.  Matter  is  that  which  is,  that 
which  has  always  been,  that  which  will  al- 
ways be.  With  Epicurus,  I  conceived  it 
as  an  infinity  of  atoms,  or  of  points,  meet- 
ing at  hazard,  and  forming  groups  here 
and  there;  it  appears  to  me  now  more  like 
a  tissue,  but  that  comes  to  the  same  thing, 
since  there  must  always  be  space  between 
the  continuous  elements  of  this  tissue. 
Otherwise  we  should  have  a  mass,  immo- 
bile, and  consequently  inert.  One  can- 
not suppress  space,  whose  reality,  how- 

93 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

ever,  it  is  impossible  to  conceive;  for 
if  space  is  empty  it  is  nothing,  and  yet 
without  this  nothingness  nothing  could 
exist. 

In  admitting  matter  in  the  form  of  a 
tissue,  we  suppose  .an  infinity  of  lines 
cutting  each  other  in  all  ways;  but  a 
line  is  made  up  of  points.  Let  us  return 
then  to  points;  that  is  clearer,  though  not 
much  so. 

Your  chemistry  believed  that  it  reached 
the  limits  of  analysis,  in  discovering  the 
molecules  that  it  counts  and  weighs.  But 
it  is  evident  that  a  ponderable  point  can 
be  cut  into  two  points  equally  ponderable, 
and  so  on  to  infinity,  and  so  on  without 
limit  of  space  or  of  time.  There  would 
be,  then,  two  infinites:  one  above  us, 
since  every  number  can  be  increased;  the 
other  below  us,  since  every  number  can  be 
diminished.  However,  since  space  must 
be  considered  as  an  absolute  void,  as  a  per- 
fect nothingness,  as  nothing,  it  is  possible 
that  each  of  these  two  infinites  would  abut 
sharply  on  this  void,  on  this  nothing.  The 

94 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

world  is  perhaps  limited.  This  tissue  is, 
perhaps,  a  sphere  isolated  in  the  midst  of 
the  nothingness.  As  one  does  not  well  see 
how  something  can  come  out  of  the  noth- 
ingness, or  how  something  can  become 
nothingness,  we  shall  conclude  that  the 
eternity  of  matter  coincides  with  the  eter- 
nity of  this  nothingness.  In  this  way  we 
shall  have  being  and  not-being.  But,  as 
not-being  is  perfectly  inconceivable  though 
necessary  to  the  existence  of  being,  we  shall 
leave  it  aside;  what  else  should  we  do  with 
it? 

I  am  aware  that  one  of  your  learned 
men  has  lately  been  able  to  speak  with  a 
certain  logic  of  the  final  annulment  of 
matter;  I  do  not  think  that  this  idea  has 
a  really  perceptible  meaning,  either  for 
men  or  for  gods.  What  is,  is.  Dis- 
integration, moreover,  does  not  signify 
destruction,  but  change.  The  face  of 
things  has  changed  and  will  change 
again,  but  the  very  essence  of  things  is 
as  eternal  as  chance.  This  universe  is 
only  one  of  the  innumerable  tricks  of 

95 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

chance,  one  of  the  fortuitous  moments 
in  the  eternal  movement  .  .  .  You  find 
this  tedious? 

I 

What  is  more  interesting,  next  to  our 
personal  life,  than  the  personal  life  of  the 
world  ? 

HE 

You  will  die,  and  the  world  as  you  see 
it  will  die  also.  The  movement  that 
created  it  by  accident  will  destroy  it  by 
its  own  continuity.  The  vulgar  eternity 
that  you  conceive  is  only  a  moment. 
Have  you  seen  a  top  spinning?  There 
is  a  moment,  about  the  middle  of  its 
gyration,  when  the  circles  described  by 
one  of  the  points  on  its  circumference 
are  all  described  with  a  sensibly  equal 
speed.  The  solar  system,  by  its  pre- 
cision, should  make  us  admit  that  the 
top  of  which  we  form  some  of  the  atoms 
is  pretty  nearly  half  way  through  its 

96 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

spin.  Motion  is  not  perpetual,  as  you 
know;  so  the  gyration  will  go  on  with 
necessarily  slackening  speed,  until  the  top 
lies  down  on  its  side  and  dies. 

I 

Oh!  our  dreams  of  eternity! 

HE 

Do  I  touch  them?  A  man  dies,  a 
man  is  born.  A  world  dies,  a  world 
is  born. 

I 

Renewal  is  not  eternity. 

HE 

It  is  not  of  eternity  you  dream,  but  of 
immobility.  The  eternity  you  have  con- 
ceived is  only  a  stoppage  of  movement. 
What  should  be  conceived  is  the  per- 
petuity of  movement.  Men,  gods,  and 

97 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

worlds;  eternal  movement  walks  us  for 
a  moment  among  the  infinities  of 
chance. 

I 

And  so  all  human  effort,  our  philos- 
ophies, our  sciences,  the  dolorous  and 
superb  edifice  of  our  civilisations  .  .  . 


HE 

Destiny  is  more  beautiful  than  all 
civilisations. 

I 

But,  if  they  must  perish,  let  their  mem- 
ory at  least  remain  in  the  intelligence  of  the 
gods! 

HE 

Can  the  gods  survive  the  world  that 
gave  them  birth?  We  are  your  brothers 
in  mortality.  Epicurus  knew  it.  He 
never  considered  the  gods  as  other  than 
provisional  immortals.  Nor  had  he  the 

98 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

singular  idea  of  a  unique  god,  infinite, 
eternal,  &c.  That  belief  had  already 
been  imported  from  Asia  into  Greece, 
but  the  Greeks,  not  understanding  it, 
presented  their  whole  pantheon  in  a  body 
with  an  ironic  immortality.  Plato  and 
Aristotle  took  it  up,  and  tried  to  make  it 
reasonable,  but  only  succeeded  in  showing 
more  clearly  its  philosophical  inanity.  I 
did  not  let  Epicurus,  whom  I  loved,  lose 
his  way  in  this  metaphysic.  God  is  a 
dream,  charming  or  cruel,  useful  or  dan- 
gerous according  to  the  heads  in  which 
it  reigns,  but  no  more  than  a  dream. 
Need  I  explain  to  you  the  impossibility 
of  God?  God  for  men  is  a  matter  not  of 
reasoning  but  of  sentiment.  Your  better 
philosophers  have  understood  him  so  well 
that  after  denying  him  in  their  intellects 
they  have  hurried  to  affirm  him  in  their 
hearts.  That  is  what  I  should  do,  perhaps, 
if  we  had  to  remain  on  the  level  of 
humanity;  but  I  am  come  to  raise  you 
above  men,  --  for  an  instant,  before  letting 
you  fall  back  again. 

99 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 
Master,  have  I  displeased  you? 

HE 

Almost  all  those  whom  I  have  raised 
above  the  earth  have  fallen  again.  The 
happiest  died,  some  moments  before  their 
perjury;  the  others  denied  me.  But 
listen.  Have  you  ever  reflected  on  the 
incontestable  mathematical  truths?  In 
any  case,  you  know  that  one  is  one,  and 
that  nothing  in  the  world  can  make  one 
two,  or  two  one.  In  the  human  brain, 
every  impression,  every  sensation,  every 
image,  every  idea,  must  find  for  lodging 
a  separate  habitation.  Who  then  has 
imagined  a  central  cell  to  replace  the 
soul?  A  useless  imagination,  since  this 
cell  could  only  be  a  reduction  of  the  brain, 
as  the  brain  is  a  reduction  of  the  world. 
A  unique  centre  of  knowledge  is  an  absurd 
conception;  this  unique  centre  is  necessa- 

100 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

rily  composed  of  as  many  receptive  as  there 
are  knowable  elements.  In  the  same  way, 
God  cannot  be  conceived  as  a  simple 
being.  If  he  existed,  he  could  exist 
only  in  complexity;  he  would  be  much 
like  a  man,  he  would  be  much  like  me, 
who  am  a  superman.  Multiply  yourself 
to  infinity  and  you  have  the  only  really 
conceivable  Almighty.  The  religions  and 
modest  philosophies  that  have  imagined 
God  in  the  form  of  a  perfect  man  have 
at  least  remained  within  the  limits  of  a  rea- 
sonable analogy.  I,  the  one  of  the  gods 
whom  men  adore,  I  tell  it  you  in  all  divine 
humility:  I  am  a  man  and  God  is  a 
man.  You  will  never  transcend  this 
respectable  conception  without  going  into 
the  absurd.  What  is  the  God  of  your 
metaphysicians?  An  abstraction  whose 
reality  is  no  more  possible  than  that  of 
heat,  good,  penetrability,  truth,  beauty, 
or  weight. 

The  religion  of  the  Greeks  was  charm- 
ing, above  all  in  later  times;  your  own  has 
now  and  then  given  me  some  gratification. 

101 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

The  Ancients  knew  the  religion  of  beauty 
and  pleasure,  you  know  that  of  grace 
and  tenderness.  I  scorn  your  philos- 
ophies, which  are  only  adroit  intellectual 
structures;  I  have  never  been  able  to 
scorn  your  legends  and  your  superstitions, 
the  traditional  obeisance  that  your  mind 
makes  to  your  sensibility.  But  this  is 
the  field  reserved  for  the  exercises  of  the 
populace,  children  and  timorous  women. 
There  are  no  noble  human  creatures  but 
those  who  are  in  love  with  themselves 
and  study  to  extract  from  their  natures 
all  the  vain  happiness  contained  in  them. 
Vain  but  real,  and  only  reality.  To 
know  that  one  has  but  one  life,  and  that 
it  is  limited!  There  is  one  hour  and 
only  one  for  gathering  the  grapes  from 
the  vine;  in  the  morning  the  grape  is 
sour;  in  the  evening  it  is  too  sweet. 
Lose  your  days  neither  in  weeping  for 
the  past  nor  in  weeping  for  the  future. 
Live  your  hours,  live  your  minutes.  Joys 
are  flowers  that  the  rain  will  tarnish, 
or  that  will  throw  their  petals  to  the  wind. 
1 02 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 
Epicurus!  Epicurus! 

HE 

Yes,  I  wish  you  to  be  a  new  Epicurus, 
and  to  teach  the  men  of  to-day  what  my 
friend  taught  long  ago  to  the  Athenians. 
Apostles  have  spoken  in  my  name  who 
have  succeeded  in  spreading  over  the  earth 
a  doctrine  of  despair.  They  taught  the 
scorn  of  all  that  is  human,  of  all  that  is 
genial,  of  all  that  is  luminous.  Unfitted 
for  natural  pleasures,  they  sought  pleasure 
in  their  own  misery  and  in  the  misery  in 
which  they  plunged  their  brothers.  They 
called  the  earth  a  valley  of  tears,  but  the 
tears  were  those  whose  abundant  flow  was 
caused  by  their  own  malignity.  Baleful 
to  themselves,  they  were  baleful  to  the 
men  who  became  the  slaves  of  their 
sombre  dreams.  After  promising  their 
faithful  an  eternity  of  chimerical  joys 
in  return  for  the  true  and  simple  joys 
they  stole  from  them,  they  took  even  hope 

103 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

from  the  heart  of  man,  they  imagined 
hell.  Sons  of  the  ancient  priests  of  Baal, 
they  set  up  in  my  name  the  cruel  idol  of 
their  fathers,  and  made  of  me  the  hideous 
and  prescient  creator  of  those  whose  des- 
tiny was  damnation.  These  monsters, 
however,  did  not  discourage  me,  and  I 
sustained  by  my  inspiration  every  effort  of 
natural  wisdom  that  I  saw  among  all  these 
horrors. 

Alas!  They  hold  you  yet,  and  those 
who  combat  them,  different  priests,  are 
sometimes  priests  more  baleful  still.  Your 
morality  is  to-day  the  lowest  and  the  sad- 
dest that  has  ever  reigned.  The  external 
hell,  in  which  you  now  scarcely  believe,  has 
entered  into  your  hearts,  where  it  devours 
all  your  joys. 


Yes,  we  are  sad.  In  us,  the  fear  of  sin 
has  survived  the  belief  in  sin.  We  dare 
not  enjoy  anything.  We  scorn  the  man  who 
sits  down  in  the  sunlight  to  drink  the  first 
rays  of  the  Spring,  but  while  we  scorn  him 

104 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

we  envy  him  his  baseness,  for  we  call  all 
unproductive  leisure  base.  When  we  can 
no  longer  work,  we  go  and  watch  those  who 
are  working. 

HE 

Your  social  state  is  an  exhibition  of 
madness.  The  Roman  slaves  had  a  life 
less  hard  than  that  of  many  of  your 
work-people.  After  the  Semitic  fashion, 
you  make  even  the  women  work!  Rich 
and  poor,  all  alike,  you  know  nothing  of 
the  joys  of  leisure.  You  give  to  work  all 
the  hours  of  your  days,  some  to  get  bread, 
others  to  achieve  a  pleasure  that  fatigue 
prevents  them  from  enjoying,  and  others 
again,  the  maddest  of  all,  to  increase  their 
wealth.  You  have  reached  that  degree 
of  imbecility  in  which  labour  is  looked 
upon  as  not  only  honourable  but  sacred, 
when,  actually,  it  is  but  a  sad  necessity. 
You  have  lifted  this  necessity  to  the  rank 
of  the  virtues,  when  it  is,  without  doubt, 
no  more  than  the  vice  of  a  perverted 

105 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

being  for  whom  life,  short  as  it  is,  is  only 
a  lengthy  tedium. 

I 

And  of  this  work,  which  at  least  allows 
us  to  breathe  and  to  eat,  there  is  not 
enough  for  all.  Thousands  of  beings  in 
the  most  civilised  towns  die  every  day  of 
hunger,  and  with  a  slow  death.  They 
are  in  agony  for  ten,  for  twenty  years  .  .  . 

HE 

Increase  and  multiply.  That  is  the 
work  of  my  father.  He  was  seized  with 
a  sort  of  jealous  and  mischievous  love 
for  the  Jews,  a  sufficiently  restless  little 
people,  and  showed  himself  curious  to 
encourage  their  natural  pride  so  far  as 
to  make  it  immoderate.  The  result  was 
comic  and  sad.  These  ignorant  Bedouins 
believed  themselves  destined  to  dominate 
the  world,  and  then  disappeared  as  a 
nation  at  the  very  moment  when  this 
domination  was  accomplished.  A  singular 

106 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

fate  for  the  Jews,  to  have  given  mankind 
a  religion  in  which  they  do  not  believe 
themselves ! 

Alas!  At  the  request  of  my  ageing 
father,  who  began  to  find  these  prolific 
barbarians  tedious,  after  having  tried  to 
enlighten  Jesus,  who  had  too  many  dis- 
ciples, I  interested  myself  in  Saint  Paul. 
I  came  to  him  as  I  have  come  to  you; 
he  was  dazzled,  and  believed  that  the 
vision  had  given  him  a  divine  mission. 
I  followed  him  in  his  journeys.  His 
energy  amused  me;  but  at  Athens,  I 
ranged  myself  with  his  opponents,  whose 
laughter  I  excited.  Later  on,  I  let  him 
die  without  consolations;  his  pride  sufficed 
him. 

I  thought  this  man  less  mad  than  the 
other  thaumaturgists  who,  like  him,  amused 
the  crowds,  but  the  idea  of  God  went  to 
his  head,  and  he  began  to  believe  in  me, 
supposing  me  omnipotent.  It  was  then  that 
I  ceased  to  visit  him,  for  I  do  not  care  to 
make  myself  the  facile  accomplice  of  re- 
ligious divagations.  Left  to  himself,  he 

107 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

went  on  hearing  me;  my  voice  sounded 
like  a  buzzing  in  his  deaf  ears.  His  faith 
grew  measureless,  and  he  accepted  martyr- 
dom. How  different  from  the  charming 
Epicurus,  for  whom  our  conversations  were 
never  more  than  a  lofty  diversion!  But 
this  Paul,  although  hallucinated,  was  not 
incapable  of  a  certain  imposture,  and  it 
was  assuredly  to  magnify  himself  in  the 
eyes  of  fools  that  he  pretended  to  have 
been  ravished  to  heaven.  It  is  true  that 
he  believed  in  my  resurrection.  What 
tales!  One  would  say  that  men  only 
give  words  a  precise  meaning  in  order 
to  have  the  pleasure  of  using  them  in  an 
opposite  sense.  Your  brain  plays  very 
singular  tricks.  The  dead  are  dead.  The 
dead  are  not  dead.  The  dead  are  living. 
The  dead  alone  are  alive.  What  jugglers 
you  are! 

I  ceased  to  do  anything  but  amuse  my- 
self with  the  developments  of  the  new 
religion.  It  produced  very  charming 
feminine  souls.  What  a  priceless  crea- 
ture was  Saint  Cecilia,  what  an  ingenu- 

108 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

ous  lover.  Perhaps  no  other  woman  has 
known  nights  so  delicious  as  those  that 
Cecilia  passed  with  the  angel  who  came  to 
visit  her  .  .  . 

I 

Valerian  found  Cecilia  praying  in  her 
bed  with  an  angel. 

HE 

Poor  Valerian!  He  never  suspected  the 
purity  of  his  betrothed.  He  loved  her 
too  well  to  be  disturbed  even  by  the 
evidence.  And  so  he  well  deserved  the 
eternal  crown  that  the  Church  decreed 
him.  If  women  were  better  cognisant 
of  the  story  of  that  excellent  young  man, 
with  what  favour  would  they  not  deco- 
rate his  memory  and  his  image!  Cecilia 
never  ceased  to  love  him.  An  enchant- 
ment enveloped  these  simple  hearts.  I 
completed  their  happiness  by  letting  them 
die  in  ecstasy  with  the  certainty  of  finding 
beyond  death  their  interrupted  kisses,  and 
of  finding  them  eternal. 

109 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I  learnt,  my  friend,  to  understand  the 
peculiar  beauty  that  the  new  religion 
concealed  within  itself;  it  held  more 
grace  than  the  purest  paganism,  and  I 
know  not  what  of  simplicity  and  tender- 
ness that  I  had  not  met  before.  Stoic 
insensibility  became  ridiculous;  suffering 
was  the  fashion;  the  crowns  of  roses 
were  changed  to  crowns  of  thorns.  There 
were  long  centuries  of  stupor,  and  when 
the  human  soul  awoke  again  and  wished 
to  smile,  its  smile  was  half  of  melancholy. 
Perhaps  men  will  never  recover  from  the 
wound  that  Christianity  has  given  them. 
Sometimes  it  has  seemed  to  heal  over;  at 
the  slightest  shock,  at  the  slightest  fever,  it 
opens  again  and  bleeds.  Happy  are  those 
who  suffer!  That  insensate  saying  still 
haunts  your  enfeebled  hearts,  and  you 
fear  joy,  from  vanity.  You  accepted  the 
anathema  hurled  at  the  happiness  of 
living  by  a  few  despairing  Jews,  and 
when  you  have  laughed  you  ask  pardon 
from  your  brothers,  because  it  is  written: 
"Happy  are  those  who  suffer." 

no 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

Man,  who  is  always  making  a  pretence 
of  revolt,  is  the  most  obedient  of  domes- 
ticated animals.  He  has  accepted  the 
most  infamous  prescriptions  of  all  the 
moralities  in  turn,  and  among  you  it  has 
always  been  a  title  to  honour  to  kneel 
before  a  decalogue  and  receive  blows  from 
a  rope  on  the  back.  The  great  hypocrites 
have  always  been  your  chosen  masters,  and 
one  still  hears  you  neigh  at  the  idea  of 
sacrifice.  Your  sensibility  has  flowered 
ill;  your  intelligence  is  inadequate.  It 
has  always  shown  itself  the  dupe  of  the 
directors  of  conscience  who  have  suc- 
ceeded each  other  on  your  shoulders. 
The  preachers  of  virtue  rarely  practise 
it.  You  have  always  had  to  deal  with 
thirsty  throats  whose  only  care  has  been 
to  make  you  believe  that  the  fountain  has 
been  poisoned. 

The  moralist  is  the  eternal  old  man  who 
makes  a  terrible  picture  of  love  to  the 
young  girl  of  whom  he  is  amorous.  Advice 
that  fetters  the  development  of  energy  is 
always  hypocritical,  that  is  to  say  inter- 
in 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

ested,  advice.  There  is  also  the  naive 
imitation  of  hypocrisy;  there  are  the 
fools,  the  vain,  the  subaltern  rogues:  but 
these  are  the  masters  whom  it  is  necessary 
to  unmask. 

I 

What!  Have  there  never  been  sin- 
cere great  minds,  true  friends  of  man- 
kind? 

HE 

What  I  have  just  said  to  you  must  not 
be  taken  tragically.  The  greatest  hypo- 
crites are  never  perfect  hypocrites.  There 
is  in  them  always  one  part  of  sincerity. 
The  exercise  of  sincerity  is  the  most 
natural  thing  in  man.  It  needs  a  strong 
will  to  create  a  fictitious  character  for 
oneself;  it  also  needs  much  talent,  per- 
haps even  genius.  The  hypocrite,  in 
showing  himself  under  a  fictitious  aspect, 
diminishes  his  pleasure  in  living;  he  will 
recover  it  in  its  entirety  only  when  he 

112 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

has  moulded  to  his  pattern  a  great  num- 
ber of  disciples;  hence  the  proselytism  of 
all  the  great  creators  of  social  lies.  But 
hypocrisy  ceases  when  the  new  environ- 
ment has  been  created,  itself  the  creator 
of  new  characters.  The  early  Protestants 
feigned  a  certain  rigidity  of  manners  in 
order  to  depreciate  the  Papists.  This 
hypocrisy  became  traditional,  then  heredi- 
tary, and  it  is  with  veritable  good  faith 
that  the  Calvinists  banish  from  life  all 
that  might  make  its  beauty  and  its  sweet- 
ness. The  Catholics,  for  strategical  pur- 
poses, have  set,  in  their  sermons  at  least, 
a  still  higher  value  on  the  scorn  of  pleas- 
ure, and  it  is  in  all  naivete  and  good  faith, 
like  the  Calvinists,  that  they  prescribe  sev- 
eral virtues  whose  practice  would  fling 
humanity  back  beyond  the  state  of  sav- 
agery. The  philosophers,  moreover,  do  not 
to-day  hold  views  different  from  these,  and 
they  would  be  much  astonished,  from  what 
they  say,  to  see  civilisation,  with  its  deli- 
cious complications,  fall  into  ruin,  and 
make  the  earth  like  the  fields  where  once 

"3 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

was  Troy,  and  the  deserts  where  rises  still 
the  phantom  of  Timgad. 

The  moral  theories  of  humanity  and  the 
form  that  they  give  to  its  daily  life  must  be 
separately  considered. 

I  have  spoken  to  you  of  the  great 
hypocrites.  There  have  also  been  men 
of  great  simplicity.  Neither  have  had  on 
the  general  march  of  events  the  influence 
you  might  suppose.  The  world  of  ideas 
and  of  words  is  one  world,  and  the  world 
of  facts  and  of  action  is  another.  They 
doubtless  react  on  each  other,  but  so  slightly, 
so  gently,  and  with  so  much  delay,  that 
their  reciprocal  influences  are  very  hard 
to  establish.  Hardly  before  the  last  fifty 
or  sixty  years  have  the  social  ideas  of  Chris- 
tianity seemed  occasionally  to  take  an  ac- 
tive form,  and  then  with  what  timidity! 
Perhaps  Christianity  will  one  day  be 
realised  in  practice,  but  it  will  then  have 
long  disappeared  as  religion,  philosophy, 
or  system  of  ethics.  And  a  new  dis- 
cord between  thought  and  life  will  be 
apparent. 

114 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

Even  this  much  post-dated  realisation 
of  the  great  social  doctrines  is,  perhaps, 
only  an  allusion.  The  field  of  thought 
and  the  parallel  field  of  action  are  finite; 
and  so  the  same  thoughts  must  return 
after  a  turn  of  the  wheel,  and  the  same 
acts.  Their  coincidence,  near  or  distant, 
is  perhaps  fortuitous.  It  is  in  vain  that 
you  think  and  speak;  action  enrolls  itself 
upon  another  plane,  and  the  two  planes 
are  perhaps  eternally  incapable  of  inter- 
section. 

At  most  it  is  admissible  that  the  vague 
spectacle  of  things  inspires  in  man  a 
chirruping  like  that  which  takes  the 
birds  at  sunrise.  But  would  you  say 
that  it  was  this  chirruping  that  made  the 
sun  rise?  Your  reasonings  on  the  power 
of  ideas,  which  would  make  them  the 
creators  of  action,  resemble  that  supposi- 
tion. The  ideas  of  man  can  never  be 
other  than  ideas  after  the  fact.  The 
future?  Do  you  even  know  what  sort  of 
weather  we  shall  have  to-morrow?  The 
future  that  you  pretend  to  foresee  is 

"5 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

only  a  past  arranged  by  your  imagina- 
tion and  your  sensibility.  You  believe  that 
what  you  wish  to  happen  will  happen. 
Children! 

The  exercise  of  thought  is  a  game,  but 
this  game  must  be  free  and  harmonious. 
The  more  useless  you  conceive  it,  the  more 
beautiful  you  should  wish  it  to  be.  Beauty; 
that  is,  perhaps,  its  only  possible  merit.  In 
any  case  you  must  not  permit  in  it  those 
little  creeping  ideas  that  haunt  cor- 
rupted brains,  as  wood-lice  haunt  rotten 
wood. 


Our  thoughts,  then,  are  freer  than  our 
actions  ? 

HE 

One  can  more  easily  retain  in  them  the 
illusion  of  liberty.  We  are  all  of  us, 
men  and  gods,  in  the  power  of  destiny, 
and  nothing  happens  that  is  not  the 
logical  and  necessary  consequence  of 
previous  movements  of  eternal  matter. 

116 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

We  are  vessels  fitfully  carried  by  winds 
and  currents  towards  an  unknown  end; 
but  it  is  one  thing  to  descend  the  uncon- 
querable stream  steering  between  the  rocks, 
and  another  to  spin  rudderless  and 
derelict.  Thought  is  a  rudder  that  must 
never  be  loosed  nor  entrusted  to  unworthy 
hands. 

But  these  ideas  are  very  general,  and 
can  scarcely,  I  think,  bring  you  much 
consolation.  I  am  like  the  apocalyptic 
preachers  who  replace  reasoning  by  per- 
sonifications of  abstract  things.  I  have 
not  come  to  you  to  offer  you  models  of 
eloquence  or  stimulating  enigmas.  If  I 
make  yet  one  more  effort  in  favour  of 
men,  I  wish  it  to  be  unambiguous  and 
clear.  But,  alas!  there  are  questions  where 
the  very  gods  lose  themselves  like  chil- 
dren in  a  forest.  The  reason  of  things 
escapes  us  as  it  escapes  yourselves.  We  too 
are  dust  of  infinity,  a  little  more  brilliant, 
that  is  all. 

Our  assemblies,  however,  consider  some 
problems  as  solved.  They  trouble  you 

117 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

still.  We  have  enslaved  them,  and  our  in- 
telligence is  their  master.  I  will  put  their 
solutions  in  your  hands,  and  then  we  will 
go  for  a  walk  in  this  springtime  that  per- 
haps you  will  never  see  again  .  .  . 


Never?  Never? 


HE 


So  beautiful,  so  tender,  so  limpid,  so  per- 
fumed. I  have  no  power  over  your  human 
destiny  and  do  not  know  it.  Before  de- 
scending .  .  . 


And     how,     master,     did    you     descend 


among  us  ? 


HE 


What  a  little  girl's  question!  I  come 
on  earth  as  easily  and  as  naturally  as  you 
go  to  America.  How?  The  knowledge 
would  be  very  useless  to  you,  and  could 

H8 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

only  tempt  you  to  puerile  and  dangerous 
experiments.  But  there  is  another  ques- 
tion that  you  dare  not  ask  me,  and  to 
which  I  shall  reply,  for  it  is  in  your  head 
if  not  upon  your  lips.  Dearest  children, 
bring  us  more  flowers,  bring  us  fruits,  give 
us  your  smiles. 

The  three  young  women  awoke,  and 
came  to  present  their  brows  to  us.  My 
friend  offered  me  her  lips  by  mistake;  I 
took  advantage  of  this,  which  made  her 
blush.  She  fled,  rejoining  her  com- 
panions. 

It  was  clear  and  hot,  though  the  sun 
was  not  visible.  The  light  seemed  to  come 
from  everywhere,  and  objects  threw  no 
shadows.  This  phenomenon,  instead  of 
frightening  me,  increased  my  sensation 
of  happiness.  It  seemed  to  me  that  I 
had  reached  at  last  a  state  of  beatitude  long 
desired.  Love  sang  in  my  heart.  I  ob- 
served with  tenderness  the  folds  of  my 
friend's  white  dress,  which  floated  behind 
her  as  she  ran.  Her  garland  of  flowers 

119 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

fell,  and,  as  she  stooped  to  pick  it  up,  her 
candid  breasts  showed  at  the  edge  of  her 
corsage.  I  could  not  prevent  myself  from 
rushing  towards  her,  in  a  frenzy,  my  mouth 
full  of  kisses  and  troubled  words. 

I 
You  have  not  hurt  yourself? 

ELISE 
But  I  have  not  fallen. 

And  she  laughed,  while  she  was  fasten- 
ing her  hair.  I  had  taken  the  garland, 
meanwhile,  and  was  inhaling  it  like  a 
bouquet.  That  made  her  laugh  still 
more. 

I 

Flowers,  Elise,  have  no  longer  their  own 
odour  when  they  have  slept  in  your  hair 
or  on  your  neck;  it  is  as  if  they  had 
become  you.  It  is  your  fragrance  that  I 
breathe  .  .  . 

1 20 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

ELISE 

As  you  like  .  .  . 

Elise  also  no  longer  knew  very  well  what 
she  was  saying.  Or  was  she,  perhaps,  read- 
ing my  heart!  Like  my  master,  she  had 
just  replied  to  a  prayer  that  I  dared  not 
formulate. 

I  stretched  out  both  arms  to  take  with 
open  hands  the  flower  that  I  desired,  the 
flower  that  was  being  given  me,  but 
Elise  was  already  in  flight.  I  caught 
her  up  in  the  middle  of  a  thicket 
of  lilacs.  It  was  there  that  she  gave  me 
my  happiness. 

Her  dress,  which  was  only  a  tunic,  fell 
slowly,  unveiling  the  loveliness  of  my 
divinity,  who  seemed  to  me  to  be  Beauty 
herself.  She  was  so  beautiful  that  my 
admiration,  for  an  instant,  was  stronger 
than  my  desire.  My  transport  had  carried 
me  to  the  summit  of  a  mountain  so  high 
that  I  became  dizzy  and  my  head  spun. 
When  I  came  to  myself,  it  seemed  to  me 
that  I  had  put  on  a  new  dignity,  and  that 

121 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  resurrection  that  had  snatched  me  from 
a  delicious  death  was  my  entry  into  a  more 
precious  life. 

My  friend,  once  more  dressed  in  her 
robe,  her  garland  of  flowers  on  her  re- 
fastened  hair,  was  picking  branches  of 
lilac.  I  rose  to  help  her,  for  an  enormous 
sheaf  was  already  filling  her  white  arms; 
she  gave  it  me,  and  then  she  made  a  harvest 
of  pinks  and  roses,  and  we  returned  to  my 
master. 

He  did  not  seem  to  have  noticed  our 
absence.  He  praised  the  flowers  and 
breathed  their  scents,  thanking  my  friend, 
who  was  blushing  a  little,  for  her  gra- 
ciousness.  The  two  other  young  women 
came  back  with  cherries  and  early  peaches, 
less  soft  than  their  rosy  cheeks.  I  fol- 
lowed the  example  of  my  master,  who 
kissed  the  hands  of  the  young  fruit- 
bearers,  and  congratulated  them  on  be- 
ing the  picture  of  pleasure,  of  abundance, 
and  of  generosity. 

Instead  of  sitting  down,  they  crouched 
at  the  feet  of  their  master,  and  offered 

122 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

him  the  finest  of  the  fruits,  looking  in  his 
face  for  signs  of  content.  There  was  a 
divine  charm  in  this  simple,  pastoral  pic- 
ture, and,  for  a  long  time,  I  observed  it 
with  joy.  These  three  beings  seemed  in 
such  perfect  communion  that  the  sweetest 
aroma  of  peace  surrounded  their  bodies. 
Satisfied,  he  touched  their  cheeks  and 
their  hair. 

HE 

Children,  I  love  you. 

They  took  again  their  places  round  the 
table.  My  friend,  who  had  leaned  her 
head  on  my  shoulder,  sat  up  to  welcome 
them.  They  spoke  in  a  whisper. 


HE 

I  would  tell  you,  my  friend,  in  answer 
to  your  secret  desire,  that  our  life,  up 
there,  or  rather  yonder,  is  very  different 

123 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

from  the  life  of  men.  To  begin  with, 
the  gods  are  very  few  in  number,  two  or 
three  thousand  at  most,  men  and  women. 
I  say,  men  and  women,  because  that  is  all 
we  are,  with  superior  faculties.  Raise 
by  many  powers  the  genius  of  your 
geniuses,  and  you  have  the  measure  of 
those  among  us  who  dominate  the  others. 
The  lesser  among  us  are  also  gods,  that 
is  to  say  that  their  sensibility,  their  in- 
telligence, their  force  and  their  beauty 
attain  a  degree  that  you  can  with  dif- 
ficulty conceive.  Your  arts,  your  sciences, 
your  noblest  passions  are  instincts  in  us; 
indeed,  we  attach  but  small  importance 
to  them.  The  length  of  our  life  has 
ended  by  teaching  us  the  uselessness 
of  all  that  is  not  pure  sensation,  and 
our  principal  care  is  the  cultivation  of 
our  senses,  which  are,  in  fact,  highly 
developed.  We  deliver  ourselves  to  every 
pleasure  with  a  divine  frankness,  and  it 
would  be  difficult  for  those  of  us  who 
have  not  associated  with  men  to  under- 
stand the  meanings  you  have  given  to 
124 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

the  words  lust,  gluttony,  and  idleness. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  pleasures  of 
relativity  are  unknown  to  us,  and  we 
are  ignorant  of  vanity,  deceit,  envy,  or 
anger.  Our  pride  is  only  the  consciousness 
of  the  force  that  we  feel  is  living  in  our- 
selves. 

Our  women  differ  little  from  yours,  that 
is  to  say  that  they  bear  the  same  relation 
to  us  as  yours  to  you.  We  do  not  consider 
them  inferior  but  different,  and  this  dif- 
ference makes  our  common  happiness. 
They  are  admirable  creatures  of  pleasure, 
but  the  pride  that  is  natural  to  them  makes 
them  selfish.  My  friend,  even  for  a  god, 
above  all  for  a  god,  perhaps,  your  women 
equal  ours.  They  know  how  to  forget 
themselves  in  love;  they  know  how  to 
find  their  happiness  in  the  happiness 
that  they  give.  If  their  senses  are  less 
delicate,  their  flesh  less  odorous,  their 
arts  of  pleasure  more  rudimentary,  their 
hearts  are  more  sensitive.  Ah!  to  read  in 
their  eyes  their  gratitude  for  the  pleasure 
they  have  given. 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

The  three  young  women,  who  had 
listened  attentively,  lowered  their  heads, 
smiling  at  each  other  out  of  the  corners 
of  their  eyes.  My  friend,  however, 
dared  to  speak. 

ELISE 

But  we  are  also  grateful  for  the  pleasure 
that  is  given  us.  Our  sensibility  is  not  only 
in  our  hearts. 

I 

Women  do  seem  to  have  no  other 
pleasure  than  the  pleasure  they  give. 

ELISE 
I  do  not  believe  that. 

HE 

Dear  creature  of  pleasure,  it  is  none  the 
less  true. 

ELISE 

It  is  true,   since  you  say  it,   but   these 
women  are  not  true  women. 
126 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

They  are  different  from  you,  my  friend; 
that  is  all.  But  I  agree  with  you;  true 
women  both  give  and  receive. 


ELISE 

That  is  true  indeed! 

I 

Divine  friend,  how  I  love  you! 

ELISE 
And  I,  I  detest  you. 

I  stretched  out  my  arms  to  draw  to  me 
those  lips  that  I  desired,  but  she  took  my 
hands  in  hers,  and  kissed  them  passion- 
ately. 

HE 

And  you  envy  the  gods! 

127 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

I  envy  neither  the  gods  nor  any  man, 
and  I  desire  no  other  woman,  since  I  have 
known  Elise. 

HE         t 

My  coming  upon  earth,  this  time,  will 
at  least  have  given  happiness  to  one  human 
being. 

ELISE 
Or  two. 

I 

What  a  dream!    Do  not  awake  us! 

HE 

You  shall  not  be  awakened. 

The  two  young  women  looked  at  me 
curiously.  I  even  thought  that  I  dis- 
cerned some  sort  of  pity  in  their  eyes. 
My  master  divined  my  thought. 

HE 

Yes,    my    friend,    they    are    immortals. 
They  came  as   I   have  come.     Is   it  more 
128 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

surprising  to  see  goddesses  on  earth  than 
to  see  a  god? 

I  turned  towards  Elise,  paling  with 
emotion. 

HE 

She  too.  But  do  not  be  afraid,  for  she 
loves  you,  and  love  has  given  her  a  heart 
exactly  like  your  man's  heart.  She  has 
become  a  woman  in  giving  herself  to  you, 
and  she  will  never  leave  you. 


ELISE 

Never.  Never  so  long  as  you  live,  my 
mortal  lover.  Never,  and  your  memory 
shall  share  my  immortality. 


Now  I  understand  the  superhuman  hap- 
piness I  found  in  your  arms,  O  queen!  But 
is  that  possible?  Have  the  times  of  mythol- 
ogy returned? 

129 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

You  see  it.  They  have  never  been 
abolished,  moreover,  unless  in  your  be- 
liefs, unless  in  what  you  believe  that 
you  believe.  For  is  not  Christianity,  just 
like  the  religions  it  thought  it  destroyed, 
the  story  of  the  relations  between  gods 
and  men?  Does  the  visit  of  a  dove  to  the 
loveliest  of  the  Jewish  women  differ  so 
much  from  the  visit  of  the  swan  to  the 
voluptuous  Leda?  The  spirit  in  which 
you  consider  these  divine  anecdotes 
changes  with  the  centuries,  but  the  anec- 
dotes are  always  the  same,  because  love 
is  always  the  same.  If  your  priests  were 
to  hear  me,  they  would  say  that  I  blas- 
phemed, I  who  was  that  swan,  I  who  was 
that  dove.  But  when  they  say  that  I  was 
the  son  of  the  dove,  they  think  they  are 
stating  a  great  truth,  and  perhaps  they  are 
right,  since  that  fable  has  changed  the 
colour  of  heaven.  But  the  colour  of  heaven 
will  change  again,  and  they  will  not  per- 
ceive it. 

130 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

All  your  science  hitherto  has  consisted 
in  giving  different  names  to  different  ap- 
pearances. Some  day,  perhaps,  you  will 
learn  that  the  same  thing  happens  always, 
that  is  to  say  nothing,  and  you  will  leave 
the  illegible  romance  of  the  infinite,  and 
live  your  own  lives.  It  is  worth  the 
trouble.  Some  day  you  will  learn  this,  and 
you  will  be  much  astonished  at  having  lost 
centuries  upon  centuries  in  vainly  observ- 
ing phenomena  of  which  you  perceive  only 
the  broken  reflections  in  a  sea  that  is 
shaken  by  the  storms  of  your  imagination. 

The  life  of  the  gods,  my  friend,  differs 
from  yours  in  this  above  all,  that  it  is  for 
them  without  finality.  Our  acts  are  suf- 
ficient to  themselves,  and  we  do  not  look 
for  their  justification  in  immediate  or 
distant  consequences.  The  wretchedness 
of  your  activity  is,  that  it  foresees  repose. 
Our  end  is  in  the  act;  yours  in  the  effects 
of  the  act.  But,  since  happiness  is  in  the 
act,  you  pass  it  by,  and  when  you  rest 
it  is  in  weariness  and  boredom.  For 
us,  to  live  is  to  act,  and  to  act  is  to  be 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

happy.  Perhaps,  rather  than  supermen, 
we  are  superior  animals:  intuition  serves 
us  as  instinct,  and  if  sometimes  we  know 
regret  we  are  always  ignorant  of  re- 
morse. Passion,  which  may  mislead  us 
for  a  moment,  leaves  us  satisfied,  as  soon 
as  we  have  obeyed  it,  even  if  our  desire 
has  been  unable  to  realise  itself  in  its 
entirety,  even  if  our  curiosity  has  had 
to  stop  half-way.  There  remains  to  us 
then  the  having  exercised  against  an 
obstacle  otir  faculties  of  action;  we  bear 
no  malice  against  the  obstacle.  We  are 
like  children  who  have  lost  in  a  game, 
and  are,  all  the  same,  very  happy  to 
have  played. 

I 

True,  man  wishes  to  win,  always  to  win, 
and,  beaten,  if  he  does  not  suffer  in  his 
vanity,  he  suffers  in  his  pride. 

HE 

Which    is    not    a    genuine   pride.     Pride 
worthy  of  the  name  does  not  rebel  against 
132 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

superior  forces.  It  yields  as  quickly  as 
possible  and  retires  into  itself,  proud  of 
what  it  is  and  disdainful  of  what  it  is  not. 
Your  human  pride  is  often  no  more  than 
a  blind  folly.  The  pride  of  the  gods  is 
clear-sighted.  But  what  need  have  you 
of  knowing  us,  since  you  have  no  power 
over  us?  Your  prayers  move  us,  as  the 
songs  of  the  birds  move  you,  according 
to  our  mood;  we  find  them  painful  or 
agreeable,  and  in  either  case  pass  on, 
thinking  of  serious  matters,  that  is  to 
say  of  the  living  of  our  lives.  The  gods, 
my  friend,  are  selfish,  and,  if  they  busy 
themselves  with  men,  it  is  from  caprice, 
in  order  to  vary  their  pleasures.  Your 
joys,  to  tell  you  the  truth,  touch  us  more 
nearly  than  your  sorrows,  and,  if  we  had 
the  power,  we  would  more  willingly 
send  new  happinesses  to  the  happy  than 
joys  to  the  doleful.  For  we  hold  in  great 
scorn  intellectual  disorder,  and  unbalanced 
sensibility:  now  unhappiness  is  produced 
by  one  of  these  two  troubles,  or  by  both. 
He  who  is  master  of  neither  his  nerves 

133 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

nor  his  thought  does  not  seem  to  us 
very  worthy  of  pity.  Help,  moreover, 
would  be  useless  to  him.  Help  would 
be  for  him  no  more  than  the  brief  sunbeam 
that  passes  between  two  storm-clouds  that 
the  wind  has  separated  for  a  moment. 
And  then,  we  have  no  power.  Ruled, 
like  you,  by  destiny,  we  contemplate  the 
eternal  movement  of  things,  with  a  more 
perspicacious  eye,  but  as  powerless  to  alter 
their  course. 

None  the  less,  I  am  not  pitiless. 
Physical  evil  breaks  my  heart,  and  it  is 
precisely  that  which  is  altogether  be- 
yond my  power,  that  which  is  without 
a  remedy.  Life  eternally  devours  itself. 
Every  organism  is  a  prey.  The  living  is 
eaten  alive.  Every  animal  is  a  feast,  and 
every  animal  is  a  guest.  The  healthy 
state  is  to  be  a  feast.  The  gods  do  not 
escape  this  dilemma;  they  are  so  organ- 
ised as  to  be  a  durable  feast,  that  is  all. 
They  resist  the  attacks  of  the  infinitely 
little,  as  a  mountain  resists  a  colony  of 
ants.  But  let  time  pass,  and  century  after 

134 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

century  go  by,  and  the  ants  will  have  got 
the  better  of  the  mountain,  though  they  are, 
nevertheless,  destined  themselves  to  perish 
under  invisible  bites. 

We  shall  see,  as  I  have  already  told  you, 
and  it  pains  me  to  think  of  it,  humanity 
disappear,  and  with  it  all  the  animal 
species  that  people  the  earth  to-day. 
Other  forms  are  elaborating  in  the  mys- 
teries of  eternal  matter.  The  water  of  the 
oceans  ferments  and  swells  with  life  round 
the  magnetic  poles.  That  which  is  born 
rises  tirelessly  against  that  which  has 
been  born.  The  sorrow  of  living  is  the 
obscure  consciousness  of  feeling  oneself 
dying. 

But  when  I  see  humanity  disappear, 
it  is  at  first  in  the  manner  of  the  ants 
and  the  bees,  and  of  all  the  other 
animalities,  once  intelligent  and  creative, 
now  reduced  to  mechanical  existence. 
You  will  come  to  resemble  marvellous 
clocks.  Your  mathematical  complexity 
will  be  the  admiration  of  the  intelli- 
gences which  have  succeeded  your  own. 

135 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

Their  multiple  and  contradictory  activity 
will  stop  sometimes,  struck  by  surprise, 
to  observe  the  sureness  of  your  move- 
ments, and  you  will  still  be  one  of  the 
terms,  though  no  longer  the  same,  in 
the  disturbing  problem  of  intelligence 
and  instinct. 

I  have  also  sometimes  thought  that  on 
your  earth  there  would  be  a  slow  return 
towards  primordial  unity.  Every  organism 
would  be  re-absorbed  into  that  formless 
yet  living  jelly,  which  has  been  differen- 
tiated, little  by  little,  in  the  course  of 
time,  into  myriads  of  dissimilar  beings. 
The  movement,  after  reaching  its  climax, 
would  retrace  its  steps.  Evolution  would 
continue  in  retrogression.  The  vertebrate 
would  become  once  more  the  annelid, 
the  annelid  the  nothing  that  creeps  like 
a  spot  of  oil  on  the  surface  of  water. 

As  for  the  destruction  of  our  solar  world 
by  a  cataclysm,  it  is  a  theatrical  idea,  but 
though  theatrical,  not  impossible.  It  is 
at  once  dramatic  and  vulgar,  within  the 
reach  of  everybody,  and  without  philo- 

136 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

sophical  or  scientific  interest.  Anybody 
can  conceive  a  shock,  and  a  bursting  in 
pieces,  as  he  conceives  a  fire,  a  wreck,  or 
an  explosion.  If  it  is  the  truth,  it  is  with- 
out interest.  The  truth  is  a  bridge  that  must 
be  crossed  to  gain  the  other  side  of  the 
stream. 


He  rose.  The  young  women,  enchanted, 
shook  their  dresses,  and  arranged  the  folds 
of  them.  Elise  threw  me  a  tender  look  and 
joined  her  companions,  who  were  already 
moving  away. 


HE 

Just  so.  Let  us  walk  a  little.  Besides, 
my  discourse  is  nearing  its  end.  We  have 
stirred  up  many  ideas.  In  putting  them  in 
their  places  in  your  head,  you  will  consider 
them  with  care.  Order  is  almost  the  whole 
of  knowledge. 

Come.  The  morning  is  about  to  be  born, 

137 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  real  morning,  and  I  do  not  wish  to  dis- 
turb that  to  which  men  are  accustomed.  I 
have  never  done  so.  The  duty  of  the  gods 
is  to  respect  logic. 

We  took  a  long  walk  through  the  fresh, 
flowering  paths.  It  seemed  to  me  that  the 
familiar  garden  became  an  immense  and 
magical  forest.  The  perspectives  stretched 
out  under  tall  trees  to  a  stream  that  flowed 
slowly  under  the  poplars  that  edged  it. 
Then  the  stream  disappeared;  it  was  a 
glade  where  roebuck  passed  in  troops. 
We  went  on  and  the  appearances  changed 
continually.  At  certain  moments  I  found 
again  the  garden  of  my  summer  morn- 
ings, with  its  lawns,  its  flower-beds,  its 
trees,  from  which  doves  kept  falling,  its 
paths,  its  seats;  I  seemed  to  hear  the 
laughter  of  the  children,  the  disputes  of 
the  players,  the  murmur  of  the  couples. 
All  this  went  on  in  my  head,  accompanied 
by  my  friend's  words,  and  I  was  drunk, 
with  love,  with  ideas,  and  with  love- 
liness. 

138 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

We  have  settled  several  great  ques- 
tions with  the  logical  intrepidity  of  our 
minds  .  .  . 

I 

As  for  me,  I  hear  and  I  believe. 

HE 

An  understanding  auditor  is  half  of  the 
discourse.  The  solitary  sinks  and  loses 
himself  in  the  whirlwind  of  his  reason- 
ings. A  word,  even  a  look,  is  enough  to 
give  him  back  his  equilibrium. 

I  was  saying,  then,  that  we  have  done 
like  the  philosophers.  We  have  solved  the 
great  questions  of  metaphysic,  by  attacking 
them  at  the  head,  that  is  to  say  at  the  part 
that  is  unattackable.  To  their  affirmation 
of  an  absolute  and  at  the  same  time  con- 
scious god,  we  have  opposed,  as  we  have  a 
right  to  do,  a  simple  and  categorical 
denial.  We  could  take  up  the  attack 
at  the  other  end,  begin  from  ourselves, 

139 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

seek  our  cause,  find  God,  seek  the  cause 
of  God,  and  so  on  to  infinity.  How- 
ever large  a  number  one  conceives,  a  larger 
is  always  possible.  And  so  this  terrible 
God  recoils  as  one  draws  near  him  into 
the  depths  of  the  abysses,  and  the  tired 
intelligence,  like  a  huntsman  who  yields 
to  the  ruses  of  his  quarry,  turns  round, 
goes  home  and  thinks  of  supper,  that  is  to 
say  of  practical  life. 

These  subtle  games  give  the  mind  a 
juggler's  skill.  They  are  neither  without 
attraction  nor  without  utility,  but  they 
are  games.  Drunkenness  is  to  be  found 
in  them,  but  not  happiness.  Now,  hap- 
piness is  the  important  matter.  One 
must  be  happy.  Let  us,  then,  limit  our- 
selves to  the  affirmation  that  the  world  is 
not  governed  by  an  intelligence  at  once 
infinite  and  conscious.  For  lack  of  another 
word,  let  us  stop  at  the  idea  of  chance,  as 
in  the  time  of  my  dear  Epicurus.  Nothing 
has  been  found  more  beautiful,  more  clear, 
nothing  that  better  satisfies  the  mind  of  a 
man  or  the  mind  of  a  god.  It  comes  to  the 

140 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

same  thing  as  saying:  that  which  is,  is. 
This  simple  proposition  admits  of  no 
objection;  it  defies  every  sophism  and 
every  artifice. 

The  idea  of  God  is  only  the  shadow  of 
man  projected  in  the  infinite.  Make  use 
of  this  sentence  as  supreme  refutation  and 
you  will  find  few  minds  capable  of  disen- 
tangling its  meaning  or  even  of  relishing 
its  irony. 

I  do  not  speak  to  you  of  the  gods  of  the 
nurses,  of  the  little  naughty  children,  and 
of  the  good  labourers.  People  sometimes 
amuse  themselves  in  narrating  my  appear- 
ance on  earth,  and  I  am  to  be  seen,  in  these 
poor  tales,  drinking  thin  wine,  gossiping 
with  housekeepers,  encouraging  strikes, 
singing  the  Internationale,  denouncing 
silk  dresses,  furs,  and  white  gloves.  I 
appear  to  the  astonished  populace  as  a  half- 
tipsy  dolt  and  a  good  fellow,  and  yet  at 
sight  of  me  civilised  men  fly  for  their  lives 
and  give  place  to  the  mob.  The  divine 
ideal  of  the  priests  does  not  much  differ 
from  this,  and,  after  all,  if  I  had  to  choose, 

141 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I  should  perhaps  prefer  the  company  of 
labourers  to  that  of  seminarists.  But  I 
have  never  been  accessible  to  such  humble 
desires,  and,  moreover,  I  am  not  God,  I 
am  only  a  god.  That  is  why  I  laugh  at 
the  confusion  of  the  catechisms,  of  the 
pious  dreams  and  of  the  revolutionary 
dreams  alike.  I  have  no  power,  but  I 
have  never  desired  either  the  reign  of 
equality  or  that  of  sanctity.  I  would 
rather  breathe  your  flowers  than  your 
souls,  your  women  than  your  intellects. 
Your  flowers!  Shall  I  tell  you?  We 
have  no  flowers;  we  have  only  those 
that  grow  wild  in  our  uncultivated  fields, 
our  pathless  forests!  The  gods  do  not 
work  . 


My  master  plucked  a  magnificent  pearly 
rose,  a  rose  as  lovely  as  a  woman's  face, 
and  remained  for  a  long  time  silent.  I 
understood  that  he  was  meditating.  He 
murmured  - 

"Work:  this  rose  is  a  work  ..." 

142 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

He  compared  it  in  his  mind  to  the  frail 
graces  of  the  eglantine. 

HE 

All  is  contradiction.  I  would  say  no 
more.  Those  who  created  this  rose  are 
not  those  who  enjoy  it.  No  payment  is  the 
equivalent  of  the  pleasure  I  feel  in  breath- 
ing its  scent;  and  I,  I  have  done  nothing 
but  pass  by,  and  pluck  it.  Men  rebel. 
How  will  you  prevent  them  from  rebel- 
lion? They  are  right  .  .  . 

He  stopped,  observing,  but  without 
seeing  it,  the  delicious  landscape  that 
surrounded  us.  The  emotional  silence 
was  only  disturbed  by  the  murmur  of 
the  bees,  the  shrill  cries  of  the  little  birds, 
or  the  light  falling  of  the  doves  whc 
dropped  from  the  trees  with  a  noise  of  silk 
dresses. 

I  was  chewing  bits  of  grass,  with  an 
air,  like  his,  of  preoccupation,  but  I  was 
thinking  of  next  to  nothing. 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

They  are  right.  And  yet  rebellion  is 
useless.  It  is  ugly.  Happiness  is  not 
in  revolt.  You  should  find  a  balance. 
You  do  not  know  how  to  rest.  I  did  not 
scorn  work  just  now,  but  praised  idle- 
ness. Take  these  two  ideas  and  plait 
them  harmoniously  together.  Your  life, 
short  as  it  is,  would  be  as  good  as  ours, 
if  you  were  to  succeed  in  uniting  these 
two  alternatives.  The  same  people  should 
turn  by  turn  rest  and  work.  But,  to 
make  oneself  worthy  of  leisure!  Perhaps 
more  intelligence  is  needed  to  know  how 
to  do  nothing  than  to  know  how  to 
work. 

The  present  state  of  things  cannot 
last.  But  can  one  ever  tell?  And  if, 
by  chance,  it  should  last?  Then,  there 
would  be  formed  two  castes  among  men. 
They  exist  already  in  sketch,  they  would 
come  to  exist  in  precise  drawings  with 
violent  contours.  It  would  be  almost 
impossible  for  a  slave  to  become  a  master. 

144 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

But  a  master  would  always  be  able  to 
become  a  slave.  Your  masters  of  the 
day  are  only  slaves  who,  freed  for  a 
moment,  will  necessarily  fall  back  into 
the  servitude  that  is  their  destiny. 

You  see,  I  am  amusing  myself  with 
prophecy.  None  the  less,  what  I  know  of 
the  order  of  things  is  what  is  apparent 
to  the  eyes  of  all.  Do  not  take  my 
words  too  seriously.  On  the  whole,  since 
men  have  had  laws,  these  laws  have  not 
varied.  No  doubt,  from  that  moment, 
your  evolution  was  complete.  Perhaps 
you  will  never  be  able  further  to  modify 
yourselves,  if  not  by  external  means. 
Hence  the  need  of  material  progress, 
which  is  only  grandiose  vanity.  At  the 
end  of  the  swiftest  journeys,  the  man  and 
the  woman  meet  face  to  face,  seeking  in 
each  other's  eyes  the  motive  of  living,  that 
is  to  say  happiness. 

Earth  has  become  a  narrow  cage  for 
you.  However,  birds  that  you  are,  it  is 
your  cage,  and  you  are  forbidden  to  leave 
it.  You  can  paint  it  in  the  tenderest 

US 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

colours;  it  is  a  cage,  and  it  is  your  cage. 
You  will  no  longer  go  to  heaven,  the 
stars  have  fallen.  If  this  heaven  of  which 
the  childhood  of  humanity  dreamed  is 
a  paradise,  all  the  seats  in  it  are  taken. 
We  have  no  need  of  you,  and  are  happy 
where  we  are;  we  shall  never  give  place 
to  you.  Besides,  at  what  moment  would 
you  undertake  the  journey?  At  your 
death?  When  one  is  dead,  it  is  a  little 
late  for  travelling.  The  immortality  of 
the  soul  was  without  doubt  the  master- 
piece of  the  ecclesiastical  imagination. 
With  this  truth  in  his  pocket,  a  man 
may  wander  through  all  countries,  and 
always  find  servants.  The  woman  who 
has  lost  her  lover  kisses  the  feet  of  the 
impostor  who  promises  her  the  renewal 
in  the  beyond  of  her  temporal  felicities. 
The  priest  offers  his  slipper  with  indiffer- 
ence. They  are  the  happiest  of  men,  for 
they  have  ended  by  believing  in  a  fable 
so  productive.  How  should  they  deny 
the  truth  and  beauty  of  this  marvellous 
tree  whose  fruits  are  gold  and  love  together? 
146 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

Those  who  promise  a  terrestrial  para- 
dise are  no  less  baleful  to  human  energy. 
They  too  teach  sacrifice,  the  scorn  of  the 
present  hour,  and  walking  and  working 
with  eyes  fixed  on  the  future.  Priests  of 
religion,  priests  of  politics,  all  sell  very 
dearly  the  tickets  of  a  lottery  that  will 
never  be  drawn.  Do  they  know  it? 
The  merchants  of  perhaps  are  not  neces- 
sarily merchants  of  lies.  Some  of  them 
are  the  first  to  be  duped  by  the  secrets 
they  have  inherited,  and  they  make 
victims  of  themselves  for  the  vanity  of 
leading  a  more  numerous  troop  of  victims 
to  the  sacrifice. 

A  tradition  encourages  you  to  honour 
the  martyr  for  his  faith.  The  martyr  is 
only  an  obstinate  man.  He  is  in  the  wrong, 
since  he  is  conquered.  The  death  that 
menaces  him  should  have  enlightened  his 
understanding. 

The  wise  man  has  but  one  belief:  him- 
self; the  wise  man  has  but  one  fatherland: 
life. 

Do  not  imagine  that  I  am  teaching  you 

147 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  vulgar  selfishness  of  the  comedies  and 
the  drinking  songs.  Oneself  may  cover  a 
world.  The  brutes  are  the  only  solitaries. 
A  man's  sensibility  is  a  surface  whose  ex- 
tent he  alone  is  capable  of  measuring.  One 
being  often  includes  many  beings.  If  it 
does  not  include  at  least  two,  it  is  not 
human,  perhaps  not  animal;  it  is  one 
of  the  stones  in  the  road  under  the  feet 
of  other  men.  True  selfishness  is  a  har- 
mony. 

But  this  harmony  must  be  composed  by 
oneself,  and  woven  with  one's  own  hands. 
To  receive  happiness  ready-made  would  be 
offering  one's  neck  to  the  rope.  Chris- 
tianity found  a  very  beautiful  formula  :  — 
to  work  out  one's  salvation.  Now  that  is 
a  personal  work.  If  some  one  should  pro- 
pose a  method  to  you,  examine  it.  If  you 
are  being  offered  salvation  already  pre- 
pared, turn  away  your  head:  the  food 
is  poisoned. 

Also,  I  bring  you  no  commandment.  I 
submit  a  system  to  you :  the  living  of  one's 
life.  What  do  those  movements  of  the 

148 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

world  matter  to  you  that  do  not  touch 
your  sensibility?  Keep  your  tears  for  your 
own  pains,  and  for  those  that  scratch  you 
like  brambles  as  you  pass.  There  is  no 
other  ethic  than  this :  the  conquest  of  pain. 
If  it  wounds  you,  be  silent,  and  think  of 
your  revenge.  Words  are  snares.  Joint 
responsibility?  Have  you  felt  the  prick? 
No?  Then  you  have  no  share  in  the  re- 
sponsibility. Do  not  judge  by  the  intellect 
the  affairs  of  sensibility,  and,  when  your 
business  is  to  understand,  be  insensible  to 
all  that  is  not  reason. 


I 

But  how  conquer  pain? 

HE 

Physical  pain  is  the  business  of  your  doc- 
tors .  .  .  The  remedy  for  moral  pain  is 
confidence  in  oneself.  To  yield  to  pain  is 
to  accept  the  worst  of  humiliations.  To 
suffer  because  of  a  woman  is  to  make  one- 

149 


I 
A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

self  the  slave  of  a  woman.  But  there  are 
moments  when  it  must  be  pleasant  not  to 
deny  one's  pain.  One  makes  a  pleasure 
of  it. 

I 

I  have  known  such  moments. 

HE 

There  are  unconquerable  evils.  Then 
the  idea  that  life  has  an  end  will  help 
to  support  the  weight  of  it.  Finally,  my 
friend,  there  is  the  supreme  act  that  your 
resigned  morality  blames,  the  act  the 
vision  of  which  gave  so  much  energy  to 
the  careless  life  of  the  ancients:  there  is 
suicide. 

Suicide  is  a  monster  that  one  would 
have  to  train  oneself  to  observe  with 
calm.  Compared  to  certain  physical  evils, 
to  certain  pains,  to  certain  forfeitures,  it 
would  soon  appear  as  a  friend,  very  ugly, 
but  cordial.  Does  it  not  deserve  the  gentlest 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

names?  Is  it  not  the  consoler?  Is  it  not 
deliverance  ? 

But  one  must  not  play  with  suicide. 
Amorous  children  have  made  of  it  a 
gesture  as  puerile  as  their  souls.  This 
supreme  refuge  from  great  pains  should 
not  be  the  remedy  for  little  deceptions. 
If  your  morality  had  chosen,  instead  of 
the  teasing  role  of  a  jealous  old  maid, 
that  of  an  amiable  and  prudent  friend,  it 
would  have  taught  you  the  art  of  wrest- 
ling with  Destiny,  and,  when  her  grip  is 
invincible  and  cruel,  the  supreme  feint, 
which  is  to  vanish  in  smoke.  To  have 
made  a  cowardice  of  suicide  is  a  singular 
idea.  It  is  explicable  in  the  order  of 
religious  beliefs;  it  is  mad  for  the  man 
who  believes  neither  in  the  survival  of 
the  soul  nor,  above  all,  in  future  com- 
pensations. 

Since,  whether  you  will  or  no,  my 
friend,  death  is  your  destiny,  at  least  live. 
Do  not  always  look  at  your  feet,  but  do 
not  look  too  far  before  you.  To  be  born, 
to  appear,  to  disappear:  forget  the  last 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

term.  Human  wisdom  is  to  live  as  if 
one  were  never  to  die,  and  to  gather  the 
present  minute  as  if  it  were  to  be  eternal. 

I 

If  the  present  minute  could  but  last  for 
ever! 

HE 

Why  not?  How  long  have  you  spent 
with  me?  Do  you  know?  Two  hours 
or  an  eternity? 

I 

It  seems  to  me  that  I  have  always 
known  you,  always  seen  you,  always  heard 
you. 

HE 

Very  well!  That  is  how  to  live. 


Do  you,  who  deny  blessed  eternity  to 
men,  give  it  them  by  your  presence  and 
your  words?  Who  are  you  then? 

152 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

HE 

Have  I  not  told  you?  See,  he  doubts 
already. 

I 
It  is  that  I  am  too  happy. 

HE 

Poor  men,  divine  sensations  are  too 
strong  for  the  fragility  of  your  nerves. 
What  would  you  do  with  an  eternity? 
You  would  spend  it  in  trembling  lest  you 
should  lose  it.  Happiness,  for  you,  is  not 
possession  but  desire.  When  you  no  longer 
have  anything  to  desire,  boredom  comes, 
sits  down  on  your  knees,  and  slowly 
crushes  you.  You  find  the  woman  who 
has  made  you  drunk  heavier  than  a 
mountain  when  the  drunkenness  passes 
away,  and  you  groan  if  the  head  that 
is  still  wet  with  your  kisses  leans  too 
lovingly  on  your  arm  or  on  your  shoulder. 

J53 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

You  find  happiness  only  in  closing  your 
eyes;  on  opening  them  again  you  find  bore- 
dom. Since  you  do  not  know  how  to  live, 
dream,  believe.  You  would  be  glad, 
would  you  not,  if  you  were  able  to  doubt 
my  words?  Well!  I  give  you  leave. 
Do  like  so  many  other  men.  Accept 
the  practice  of  a  belief  that  makes 
you  laugh,  and  of  an  ethic  that  you 
scorn  . 


No,  no,  I  am  free!  You  have  loosed  my 
hands,  you  have  taught  me  to  breathe. 

HE 

Ah!  So  the  method  I  propose  to  you 
is  not  so  bad!  I  believe,  indeed,  that,  of 
all  those  that  can  rule  the  life  of  a  wise 
man,  it  is  the  most  voluptuous.  If  doubt 
has  no  longer  a  place  in  your  intelligence, 
put  it  into  your  actions.  Knowing  the 
vanity  of  everything,  of  religions,  of  philos- 
ophies and  of  ethics,  submit  outwardly  to 

154 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

customs,  to  prejudices,  and  to  tradition. 
Time  your  step  to  the  rhythm  of  the 
popular  mind. 

I 
What!  Submission? 

HE 

Do  you  prefer  revolt? 

I 

I  am  not  a  slave. 

HE 

Very  true.  But  liberty  is  an  internal 
joy.  One  is  the  more  free  the  less  one  seeks 
to  appear  so.  A  woman  is  less  beautiful 
when  she  has  divulged  her  beauty.  A 
man  is  less  free  when  he  makes  a  parade 
of  his  liberty.  One  must  hide  one's  good 
fortunes. 

My  friend,  I  have  shown  you  the 
philosophy  of  the  gods.  Accept  its 
method  if  you  feel  yourself  strong 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

enough  to  follow  it  without  despair.  We 
are,  and  that  suffices  us.  Can  you  say  as 
much?  you  who  cannot  take  a  step 
towards  happiness  without  taking  one 
towards  death?  Hope,  if  you  have  need 
of  hope.  Drink,  if  you  are  thirsty.  Do 
you  think  that  I  am  jeering,  and  that, 
after  having  treated  you  as  a  god,  I  am 
treating  you  first  as  a  man  and  then  as  a 
child?  No.  The  truth  is  that  every  ques- 
tion immediately  receives  in  my  mind  all 
the  different  and  even  contradictory  solu- 
tions that  can  answer  it.  I  see,  would  you 
believe  it,  the  six  sides  of  the  cube  at  one 
glance.  I  know  that  the  least  reasonable 
of  things  is  reason;  I  know  that  nothing 
is  more  cruel  than  sentiment.  There  is 
not  one  of  your  systems  of  which  I  cannot 
make  a  circuit  in  two  or  three  thoughts. 
They  are  curious  ruins;  some  of  them  still 
attract  such  a  concourse  of  people  that  one 
forgets  that  they  are  ruins.  Travel,  and 
make  pilgrimages.  I  have  favoured  the 
materialism  of  Epicurus,  Saint  Paul's 
Christianity,  Spinoza's  pantheism.  Have 
156 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I  spoken  to  you  of  Spinoza?  I  loved  him 
much  also.  We  used  to  drink  milk  while 
we  were  discovering  the  identity  of  real- 
ity and  perfection.  He  was  one  of  the 
two  completely  happy  men  I  have  known; 
the  other  was  Epicurus.  Spinoza  found 
happiness  in  asceticism;  Epicurus,  in 
pleasure.  They  both  lived  smiling.  I 
regretted  them  equally.  There  are  two 
masters  for  mankind,  and  nearer  to  man- 
kind than  myself. 

I  remember  one  of  Spinoza's  propo- 
sitions: "Each  man  necessarily  desires  or 
repulses,  according  to  the  laws  of  his 
nature,  what  he  considers  good  or  bad." 
That  means:  every  one  naturally  desires 
to  be  happy.  Great  commonplace,  and 
great  truth:  there  is  no  other  philosophy, 
there  is  no  other  method.  Virtue  is,  to  be 
happy. 

They  are,  then,  very  wicked,  those 
among  you,  who,  keeping  power,  that  is 
to  say  force,  in  their  own  hands,  use  it 
to  forbid  men  access  to  the  road  that 
displeases  themselves.  What!  I  should 

157 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

have  used  my  power  to  undeceive  Cecilia, 
whose  innocent  kisses  were  prayers,  whose 
life  was  a  happy  walk  towards  martyrdom 
and  heaven!  What  infatuation,  to  be- 
lieve oneself  in  possession  of  the  truth, 
and,  then,  what  childishness,  to  believe 
that  the  truth  is  necessarily  useful!  My 
friend,  what  is  true  is  true,  and  what  is 
beautiful  is  beautiful,  and  between  these 
terms,  and  between  all  that  could  be  in- 
serted, there  is  no  necessary  relation.  I 
smile  at  human  illusions,  but  I  would  not 
make  them  one  in  a  single  and  compulsory 
illusion. 

You  love  Elise;  obey  your  desires  even 
if  they  seem  absurd  to  you.  She  will  do  the 
same  for  you,  and  you  will  both  taste  great 
joys. 

We  had  returned,  little  by  little,  to  our 
starting  point.  The  young  women  joined 
us  near  the  rose-garden.  A  different  light 
had  replaced  the  springtime  brilliance  that 
surrounded  us.  The  real  morning  had  just 
been  born,  a  clear,  cold  winter  morning. 

158 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

I  wished  to  pluck  a  rose,  but  they  dis- 
appeared as  I  stretched  out  my  hand. 
Elise  took  my  arm  and  pressed  close 
to  me. 

ELISE 
I  am  cold. 

vn 

I  doubted  her  divinity,  I  doubted  my- 
self, and  the  enchanted,  luminous  night 
I  had  just  lived.  My  master's  last  words 
were  disturbing  the  certainty  that  he  had 
at  first  established  in  my  mind.  I,  who 
had  believed  myself  a  god,  became  again 
a  man. 

HE 

That  is  the  effect  of  doubt.  Then  you 
ho  longer  believe  in  me? 


I  believe  in  you. 

159 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

Instantly,  things  recovered  their  magical 
appearance,  and  I  was  happy  again.  I 
gently  pressed  Elise's  arm,  and  she  looked 
at  me  with  tenderness. 

Meanwhile,  the  two  young  friends,  who 
were  walking  before  us,  had  come  upon  the 
steps  of  the  Museum.  We  followed  them. 
They  examined  in  silence  the  cold  nudity 
of  all  those  women  of  stone,  but  sometimes 
I  heard  them  laugh. 


ELISE 
And  so  these  are  your  women. 


They  are  not  our  women.   These  figures 
represent  our  ideal  of  the  goddesses. 

ELISE 

Truly,  this  one  is  like  me. 
160  ' 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

) 

I 

There  are  women  as  beautiful  as  that 
among  us,  but  one  does  not  know  them. 
Each  one  of  us  thinks  he  has  held  in  his 
arms  the  most  beautiful  woman  in  the 
world;  when  he  reflects,  he  is  no  longer 
very  sure  of  it,  for,  in  the  depths  of  his 
desire,  an  image  ceaselessly  forms  and 
ceaselessly  vanishes,  whose  beauty  no 
created  thing  could  equal. 

ELISE 

So  reality  always  deceives  you.  How  do 
you  manage  to  be  happy? 


We  have  desire. 

I  had  spoken  like  a  man,  and  not  like 
one  whose  mistress  is  an  immortal.  Elise 
seemed  indifferent  to  the  obscure  sorrow 
that  darkened  my  words. 

161 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

My  nature  now  was  double.  When  I 
thought  of  my  master,  of  Elise,  of  the 
hours  passed  in  the  garden,  I  felt  that  I 
was  caressed  and  upheld  by  warm  waves 
of  joy;  when  I  considered  the  things  of 
earth,  I  was  cold,  and  I  was  sorrowful. 

Elise  left  me  once  more  to  go  and  join 
her  companions.  My  master  called  me. 
He  was  seated  at  the  entrance  to  the  hall, 
and  was  looking  at  nothing. 

HE 

I  have  still  a  few  words  to  say  to  you, 
and  these  are  the  most  important.  You 
must  forget  our  conversation. 

I 

Master,  it  is  impossible.  It  is  part  of 
myself,  it  has  entered  into  my  flesh,  into  my 
blood,  into  my  bones. 

HE 

Ah,  well,   you   shall   know   then  that  I 
could   have   told   you   the   exact  opposite, 
162 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

and  that  that  also  would  have  been  the 
truth.  Another  god  may  descend  and 
speak  to  you  and  give  you  other  teaching. 
In  which  will  you  put  your  trust? 


Master,  you  disturb  me.  Can  such  a 
miracle  be  repeated? 

HE 

When  one  believes  in  a  miracle,  it  may 
become  a  daily  occurrence.  You  see,  you 
would  do  better  to  forget. 


I  shall  not  forget. 


HE 

And  what  if  I  were  to  prove  to  you 
that  I  do  not  exist,  that  I  am  only  a  part 

163 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

of  yourself,  that  responds  to  another  part 
of  yourself? 

I 

Master,  I  believe  in  you,  and  not  in  my- 
self. 

HE 

Behold  man  with  a  true  Christian  nature, 
man  after  the  fall!  You  will  never  wash 
away  sin,  or,  rather,  you  will  never  wash 
away  penitence.  Why  do  you  not  hold 
your  own  against  me?  What  a  domestic 
animal  has  man  become!  Have  you  not  at 
the  bottom  of  your  heart  a  secret  desire? 
Does  the  god  that  I  appear  to  you 
satisfy  fully  your  need  of  worship  and 
humiliation?  Speak,  my  friend,  I  am 
what  you  desire  that  I  should  be. 
Choose.  The  phantasmagorias  are  at 
your  command. 


Well,  yes,  I  should  have  wished  you  to 
be  He,  to  perfect  in  my  eyes  the  legends 
164 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

of  my  childhood  .  .  .  But  you  have 
spoken,  and  I  no  longer  believe  but  in 
you,  in  you  alone. 

HE 

Choose.     There    is    yet    time.     Choose. 

I 

I  have  chosen. 

At  that  very  instant,  all  pleasure 
vanished,  and  I  felt  ill,  with  that  over- 
whelming illness  that  follows  nights  of 
debauch.  Nothing,  however,  had  changed 
around  me,  and  I  was  standing  among  the 
same  marbles,  though  they  were  frozen 
and  made  me  almost  ashamed  and  al- 
most afraid.  I  heard  the  laughter  of 
the  young  women  in  the  neighbouring 
hall,  but  it  seemed  to  me  to  come  from 
a  bevy  of  hoydens.  My  master,  still 
seated  there,  was  looking  at  me,  but 
with  eyes  in  which  I  thought  I  saw  I 
know  not  what  cruel  mockery,  I  know  not 
what  mournful  reproaches.  I  was  seized 

165 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

with  anguish,  I  breathed  with  difficulty, 
I  was  cold,  the  memory  of  my  noc- 
turnal lusts  disgusted  my  heart.  I  was 
about  to  faint,  perhaps,  when  my  master 
spoke. 

HE 

So  you  have  chosen.  It  is  well. 
Good-bye. 

I 

Oh!  No!   Not  yet! 

HE 

Would  you  care  to  salute  those  charm- 
ing young  women?  Here  they  are. 

I  saw  them  advancing  towards  me, 
naked,  and  smiling  from  head  to  foot, 
with  a  docile  smile.  They  held  each  other 
by  their  necks,  their  arms  entwined,  like 
the  three  graces,  but  their  hips  swayed  to 
an  evil  rhythm. 

166 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 
How  ugly  they  are!    Sorceresses! 

HE 
They  are  your  sins. 

I 

I  detest  them. 

They  turned  and  fled.  Their  buttocks, 
joined  like  three  curious  faces,  made  an 
obscene  and  singular  diagram. 

HE 
Women  belong  to  metaphysics. 

I  was  too  disturbed  to  understand  this 
saying.  I  was  thinking  of  Elise,  whom  I 
had  loved  so  passionately,  and  I  wept  at 
seeing  her  thus.  I  wept  also  over  myself 
and  my  lust. 

HE 

Women  are  creations  of  sensibility,  of 
intelligence,  or  of  faith;  that  depends  on 

167 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  moment,  it  depends  on  the  man.  The 
difference  between  the  goddess  and  the 
girl  of  the  public  harem  is  made  by  the 
idea  of  sin.  As  a  sinner,  you  see  courtesans 
where,  as  a  god,  I  see  divinities.  The 
world  is  what  you  make  it,  creator  without 
knowing  it.  Since  you  have  chosen,  good- 
bye, good-bye! 

I 
Elbe. 

She  whom  I  had  loved,  she  whom  I 
loved  still,  ran  towards  me,  in  the  form  of 
the  young  woman  who  had  so  moved  my 
heart.  She  offered  me  her  hands  and  her 
lips,  as  if  she  had  returned  from  a  journey, 
and  she  pressed  me  passionately  in  her 
arms. 

HE 
Then  you  have  not  chosen? 


I  cannot  separate  from  her  I  love. 
168 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

ELISE 
I  remain  among  men. 

I 

For  ever? 

ELISE 
I  remain. 

HE 

I  will  come  back  for  you.  Good-bye 
then,  my  friend,  and  this  time  really 
good-bye.  You  sought  truth  and  you  have 
found  love.  Good-bye. 

Elise  drew  me  along.  By  the  door,  I 
turned.  My  master  had  disappeared. 

This  separation,  which  I  was  expecting, 
caused  me  but  a  brief  sorrow.  I  was  hold- 
ing Elise  by  the  hand,  I  was  holding  a 
certainty. 

We  were  now  going  silently  along  the 
deserted  street.  The  joy  that  filled  my 
heart  lit  up  the  sky,  the  trees,  the  houses  and 
everything  else. 

169 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

Soon,  like  any  other  couple  after  a 
morning  walk,  we  went  home.  Elise 
had  not  at  any  moment  the  air  of  a 
stranger. 

Our  day  was  short,  that  of  two  lovers 
mindful  of  living.  My  friend  complied 
with  all  our  customs.  But  for  the  memory 
of  the  night  of  magic  that  had  placed  her 
in  my  arms,  I  should  not  have  distin- 
guished her  divine  grace  from  that  of  a 
Parisian. 

We  made  with  profound  joy  the  dis- 
covery of  our  souls  and  of  our  bodies. 
It  seemed  to  us  that  we  had  known 
each  other  always,  and  always  belonged  to 
each  other;  it  seemed  also,  at  every  kiss, 
that  we  touched  each  other  for  the  first 
time:  these  feelings,  no  more  contradictory 
than  delightful,  increased  our  intoxication, 
our  heads  turned,  we  could  no  longer  find 
words  for  our  ideas,  and  we  said  a  great 
many  childish  things. 

I  did  not,  however,  so  far  lose  my 
reason  as  to  forget  that,  alone  among 
all  men,  without  doubt,  I  held  in  my 

170 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

arms  an  immortal.  Much  pride  was 
mingled  with  my  love,  and  also  much 
curiosity. 

My  goddess  much  resembles  Giorgione's 
Venus.  While  I  write  this,  she  is  sleeping 
in  the  same  pose,  her  right  arm  folded 
under  her  head.  The  body  is  tapering, 
the  breasts  are  two  upturned  cups;  the 
face,  of  a  pure  oval,  has  great  charm, 
with  its  very  red  mouth,  and  its  large 
lowered  eyelids  that  hide  from  me  beau- 
tiful eyes  of  a  glaucous  and  changeful 
blue.  From  head  to  foot  she  has  the 
complexion  of  a  blonde,  but  this  white- 
ness is  as  if  melted  in  gilded  rose,  because 
she  is  accustomed  to  wear  only  light  and 
almost  transparent  veils.  Her  hair  is  of 
that  rare  chestnut  colour,  a  colour  which 
we  scarcely  know  but  by  its  name;  but 
her  eyelashes  are  much  darker,  of  a  very 
sombre  brown. 

I  have  kissed  with  piety  the  miracle  of 
her  feet,  fresh  as  a  spring,  and  with  nails 
that  shone  like  drops  of  dew  under  my 
lamp. 

171 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

She  accepts  homage  like  caresses,  and 
caresses  as  a  flower  accepts  the  evening 
rain.  She  is  more  feminine  than  the  most 
sensitive  of  women,  more  trembling  than 
the  tenderest  violins.  The  kiss  that  her 
mouth  gives  has  first  passed  like  a  wave 
of  harmony  along  her  whole  body,  and  the 
kiss  that  she  receives  makes  her  melt  volup- 
tuously like  snow  that  has  lingered  in  the 
sunlight. 

0  snow  with  the  odour  of  violets,  O  flesh 
with  the  taste  of  figs ! 

1  have  eaten  and  I  have  drunken,  and 
now    I    write    the    praise    of   my    delight, 
among   some   metaphysical   memories.     Of 
the  life  that  goes  on  up  there,  or  yonder, 
she  has  told  me  something  more  than  my 
master.   She  has  told  me  that  perfect  pleas- 
ure is  a  gift  too  common  among  the  gods 
much    to    excite    their    gratitude.     They 
walk  under  the  trees  of  the  orchard,  and 
pluck  the  gilded  fruit  whose  weight  bends 
them  within  reach  of  their  hands.    More 
lively    and     more     sensitive,     the     divine 
females    feel    now    and    then    some    vexa- 

172 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

tion  at  being  unable  to  knot  their  arms 
about  the  conquered  male;  there  is  some- 
times melancholy  in  their  eyes,  at  seeing 
light  shoulders  moving  away  that  happiness 
has  not  crushed,  and  knees  that  gratitude 
has  not  bowed. 

We  speak. 

t 

ELISE 

Tell  me,  you  whom  I  love,  are  all  men 
like  you? 

I 

Men  are  not  gods  during  love,  but  they 
are  gods  afterwards. 

ELISE 

That   is    to   say   that   they   become    in- 
different. 

I 
No,  satisfied,  and  surfeited. 

ELISE 
Then  they  are  not  always  hungry? 

173 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

I 

Alas!  No. 

ELISE 

But,  at  least,  they  do  not  disdain  the 
mouth  whose  moisture  has  made  them 
drunk  ? 

I 
They  forget  even  the  taste  of  it. 

ELISE 

They  too?   I  feel  like  crying. 

I 
There  are  some  who  love  tears. 

ELISE 

You  love  tears? 

I 

How  do  I  know?  When  one  is  happy, 
one  no  longer  loves  anything  but  one's  own 
happiness. 

174 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

Thereupon  she  dreamed  for  a  long  time, 
perhaps  without  very  well  understanding, 
for  there  came  no  more  words  to  her  mouth, 
but  only  kisses. 

With  the  details  I  could  get  from  her,  in 
our  clearer  moments,  on  the  life  of  the  im- 
mortals, I  pictured  their  dwelling-place  as 
an  earthly  paradise  of  the  kind  described 
to  us  in  the  Jewish  legends.  It  is  probable 
that  ancient  indiscretions  had  long  ago  in- 
formed some  Asiatic  poet.  The  popular 
mind,  friendly  to  confusions,  placed  at  the 
beginning  of  our  world  a  paradisiac  state 
which  is  parallel  to  our  world,  and  other- 
wise closed  to  men.  The  Greeks,  with  their 
adventures  of  the  gods  among  us,  also 
divined  a  little  of  the  truth  that  had  just 
been  revealed  to  me  in  these  two  mytho- 
logical nights.  I  understood  that  men  do 
not  invent,  but  remember.  How  I  rejoiced 
at  sharing  in  these  mysteries!  What  mo- 
ments! how  express  their  odour,  how  paint 
their  brilliance  and  their  beauty? 

I  shall  continue  every  morning  to  keep 

175 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  journal  of  the  happiness  of  my  heart 
and  the  satisfactions  of  my  intellect.  Lover 
of  an  immortal,  I  see  the  Arcana  open  at 
last  before  my  one-time  sorrowful  desire. 
The  Arcana!  For  I  feel  that  I  am  about 
to  enter  into  the  Unity. 

But  I  have  been  writing  for  a  long  time. 
I  am  tired.  My  mistress  is  waiting  for  me. 
She  sleeps,  she  is  still  sleeping.  Perhaps, 
with  them,  there  is  no  sleep.  She  tastes 
for  the  first  time  the  happiness  of  not  liv- 
ing. .  .  . 


176 


FINAL  NOTE 


FINAL  NOTE 

M  JAMES  SANDY  ROSE  was 
found  sitting  at  his  work-table, 
*  his  head  laid  on  his  desk.  He 
seemed  asleep,  and  he  was  dead.  The  pen 
had  escaped  from  his  fingers,  and  rolled  to 
the  ground,  leaving  a  large  blot  of  ink  on 
the  paper.  After  the  word  "vivre"1 
comes  the  first  letter  of  a  word  that 
ends  in  a  serpentine  scrawl.  This  letter 
is  doubtless  a  V,  and  perhaps,  as  would 
have  been  fairly  characteristic  of  his  style, 
he  was  going  to  begin  a  new  phrase  with 
this  same  word,  Fivre,  when  death  struck 
him  down. 

All  this  is  of  small  importance.  Be- 
sides, we  are  giving  a  facsimile  of  the  last 
page  of  this  manuscript  whose  singular 

1The  last  word  of  the  manuscript. 

179 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

aspect  has,  no  doubt,  a  psychological  value. 

It  has  already  been  seen  that  the  death 
of  M.  J.  Sandy  Rose  was  spoken  of  by  the 
newspapers  under  the  title  of  "The  Mys- 
tery of  the  Rue  de  Medicis. " 

Their  account,  without  being  altogether 
inaccurate,  was  very  incomplete.  Here  is 
exactly  what  happened,  or  at  least  what  I 
saw  and  knew. 

Sandy  Rose  called  at  my  rooms  almost 
every  day  at  about  five  o'clock,  on  his  way 
to  the  post.  I  live  in  the  Rue  de  Tournon, 
behind  an  old  garden.  We  used  to  go  out 
together,  and  often  dined  together.  On  the 
nth  of  February,  as  I  had  not  seen  him 
for  three  or  four  days,  I  decided  to  go  to 
his  rooms.  It  was  half-past  three.  The 
concierge,  at  first,  dissuaded  me  from 
going  up,  and  assured  me  that  M.  Sandy 
Rose  was  away.  A  bundle  of  letters 
and  several  telegrams  were  awaiting 
him. 

"What  if  he  is  ill?"  I  said.  "What  if 
he  is  dead?" 

"Oh!   But    how    am    I     to    find    out? 

1 80 


/fr**  1/4*, 


I/  fs6#s  ,  j*  <** 

f  »  f  f 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

How  am  I  to  open  his  door?  We  should 
have  to  have  a  locksmith,  witnesses,  the 
commissaire  ..." 

Without  answering,  I  bolted  up  the  stair- 
case. When  I  reached  the  door,  on  the 
fifth  landing,  I  rang,  knocked  very  loudly, 
and  then  bent  to  look  through  the  crack,  or 
glue  my  ear  to  the  keyhole.  It  was  dark, 
a  small  iron  thing  went  into  my  eye.  The 
key  was  in  the  door. 

At  that  moment,  I  heard  the  voice  of  the 
concierge,  who  had  followed  me. 

"Well!  You  see!" 

"The  key  is  in  the  door." 

"Impossible;  it  was  not  there  yesterday 
evening,  and  he  has  certainly  not  come  in. " 

"Look!" 

And  I  turned  the  key.  The  door  opened. 
The  flat  consisted  of  the  kitchen,  on  the 
left  as  one  went  in,  and  three  rooms 
opening  into  each  other,  along  the 
street.  We  opened  three  more  doors. 
The  last  let  us  see  the  spectacle  I  have 
described. 

The  death  was  recent.  The  body  was 

183 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

cold,  but  not  frozen,  and  the  fingers  of  the 
right  hand,  which  was  hanging  over  the 
arm  of  the  chair,  were  still  supple.  Later 
on  the  doctor  declared  that  death  must  have 
occurred  about  twelve  hours  before  my 
arrival. 

Two  young  clerks,  brothers,  who  live  in 
a  neighbouring  room,  came  home  at  this 
moment.  We  sent  one  of  them  in  search 
of  the  police,  and  the  other  remained  with 
me,  while  the  concierge  went  back  to  her 
lodge. 

While  waiting  for  the  police  to  draw  up 
their  official  statement,  I  made  a  mental 
inventory  of  my  friend's  room.  Its  aspect 
seemed  to  me  odd.  The  bed,  a  great 
four-posted  one,  very  large  and  almost 
sumptuous,  the  only  luxury,  moreover, 
of  this  sentimental  and  libertine  youth, 
was  in  disorder.  It  told  of  a  night  of 
frenzied  passion,  or  of  an  attack  of  hal- 
lucinatory fever.  The  counterpanes  were 
dangling,  the  pillows  were  one  at  the 
foot  and  one  in  the  middle  of  the  bed; 

184 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

two  candles  at  the  bed-side  had  burned 
themselves  out.  A  man's  clothes  had  been 
flung  on  a  sofa,  and  among  these  clothes 
I  found  a  woman's  dress,  of  antique  or 
rather  empire  fashion,  a  sort  of  tea-gown 
of  spongy  white  linen,  very  fine,  with 
a  gathered  belt,  much  lacework,  and 
blue  and  yellow  embroideries.  I  saw 
besides  some  plain  white  silk  stockings, 
yellow  garters  with  paste  buckles,  and 
one  slipper  in  blue  morocco;  I  did  not 
find  the  other. 

The  man's  clothes  were  those  of  my 
friend,  who  was  dressed  at  the  moment  in 
a  grey  flannel  suit  and  a  brown  dressing- 
gown.  Nothing  could  be  simpler.  But  the 
dress,  and  the  silk  stockings?  Did  Sandy 
Rose  amuse  himself  with  robing  his  mis- 
tress magnificently,  before  unrobing  her? 
The  presence  of  a  woman  seemed  proved 
by  this  theatrical  costume.  The  stockings 
had  been  worn;  some  one  had  even  walked 
bare-foot  in  one  of  them,  doubtless  looking 
for  the  slipper  that  had  slid  away  under  a 
piece  of  furniture. 

185 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

On  the  mantelpiece,  I  found  a  big  tor- 
toiseshell  comb,  a  necklace  of  pearls,  no 
doubt  false,  another  of  amethysts,  some 
ancient  rings,  and  two  bracelets,  one  of 
braided  gold,  the  other  of  cameos. 

I  opened  a  little  door.  The  state  of  the 
washing-stand  showed  that  it  had  been 
recently  used.  There  were  still  drops  of 
water  on  the  marble,  and  the  towels  were 
damp.  On  a  comb,  I  found  some  woman's 
hairs,  blond,  very  long;  a  powder-box 
was  open.  A  perfume  that  I  could  not 
identify  was  floating  in  this  closet,  some- 
thing like  peppered,  highly  peppered, 
jessamine. 

In  the  fireplace  of  the  room  a  log  was 
still  burning,  among  dead  pieces  of  coal. 

I  returned  to  the  table  on  which  was  rest- 
ing the  lifeless  head  of  my  unfortunate 
friend.  He  seemed  asleep,  and  I  was  glad 
of  it,  for,  if  a  tragic  story  is  to  be  as  it 
should,  the  dead  must  seem  to  sleep. 

There  was  nothing  on  the  table  but  a 
quantity  of  sheets  of  paper  covered  with 
big,  irregular  handwriting,  nothing  but 

1 86 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

that  and  an  ink-pot.  The  pen  had  fallen 
down. 

At  this  moment  the  commissaire  arrived 
with  a  scribe.  Notes  were  taken.  The 
doctor  who  had  come  attested  some- 
thing. 

"Natural  death?" 

"The  most  natural  in  the  world." 

And  he  pointed  first  to  the  bed  and  then 
to  the  writing-table. 

"Sexual  followed  by  cerebral  excesses. 
These  papers,  perhaps,  will  give  us  an  ex- 
planation. " 

Meanwhile  the  commissaire,  who  had 
opened  a  drawer,  found  a  will  that  left 
everything  to  me;  the  doctor,  happy  to 
do  nothing,  stopped  putting  together  the 
sheets  of  the  manuscript. 

"I  do  not  dispute  them  with  you.  I 
have  signed.  I  am  off." 

My  rights  were  soon  legally  confirmed. 
Meanwhile  I  thought  of  the  woman  who 
had  worn  the  white  dress  with  yellow  em- 
broideries and  put  her  feet  in  the  slippers 

187 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

of  blue  morocco.  I  sought  her  and  did  not 
find  her.  Singular  rumours  went  about,  set 
on  foot  by  the  journalists.  M.  Sandy  Rose 
had  been  strangled  by  a  woman  with  whom 
he  had  spent  the  night.  She  had  disap- 
peared at  dawn,  taking  money  and  jewels. 
I  had  no  difficulty  in  exposing  the  absurd- 
ity of  this  hypothesis,  firstly  because  we  had 
noticed  no  trace  of  violence  on  the  body  of 
the  defunct,  and  secondly  because  many 
precious  stones,  as  well  as  a  quantity  of 
gold  pieces,  were  found  in  the.  same  drawer 
as  the  will,  which  was  not  locked. 

Little  by  little  there  came  to  be  silence 
concerning  the  story,  and  I  was  alone  in 
sometimes  thinking  of  it. 

It  is  certain  that  Sandy  Rose  went  home 
on  Thursday  morning,  the  8th  of  Febru- 
ary, about  nine  o'clock,  accompanied  by  a 
woman.  He  took  his  letters:  no  letter  or 
paper  of  earlier  date  was  found  in  the  Sun- 
day packet.  It  is  also  certain  that  he  went 
out  with  this  woman  about  midday,  and 
that  they  returned  about  eight,  this  time 
without  speaking  to  the  concierge,  without 

188 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

answering  her  question:  "Monsieur  Sandy 
Rose,  aren't  you  going  to  take  your  let- 
ters?" Finally,  from  that  moment  on,  the 
concierge  saw  no  one,  neither  Sandy  Rose 
nor  the  lady,  whose  name  she  did  not  know, 
though,  she  says,  she  had  noticed  her  light- 
coloured,  almost  white,  dress;  and  adds, 
"I  was  surprised  at  it,  because  of  the 
colour. "  On  Friday  morning,  she  knocked, 
at  the  hour  at  which  she  was  accustomed 
to  come  and  clean  out  the  rooms.  She 
knocked  again  in  the  afternoon,  and  rang 
the  bell;  in  vain.  It  was  the  same  on  Sat- 
urday and  Sunday,  and  she  had  therefore 
concluded  that  he  was  away,  as  was  not 
unlikely,  for  my  friend  sometimes  went  to 
spend  a  week  at  Menton,  and  never  went 
alone. 

These  little  facts,  whose  accuracy  I  can- 
not doubt,  do  not  contradict  certain  details 
that  have  been  read  in  my  friend's  manu- 
script, but  I  am  far  from  offering  them  as 
a  proof  of  the  veracity  of  his  story.  I  give 
on  the  one  hand  the  manuscript,  as  the  will 
obliges  me,  and  on  the  other  the  result  of 

189 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

my  inquiry,  as  friendship  demands;  that 
is  all. 

I  must  note  one  last  detail.  No  trace  of 
food  was  found  in  the  flat,  except  some 
paper  that  had  been  used  in  wrapping  up 
cakes,  or  perhaps  a  pate,  and  six  empty 
champagne  bottles.  But  there  is  nothing 
to  prove  that  these  relics  are  contempora- 
neous with  the  period  that  interests  us.  It 
is,  however,  probable  enough. 

The  telegram  mentioned  on  page  36  has 
not  been  printed  by  the  Northern  Atlantic 
Herald.  It  is  even  doubtful  if  it  was  ever 
sent  off.  At  least,  the  inquiries  I  have  made 
have  been  without  result. 


190 


APPENDIX 
REMY  DE  GOURMONT 

BY 

ARTHUR  RANSOME 


APPENDIX1 

REMY  DE  GOURMONT 

BY 

ARTHUR  RANSOME 


I 


M.  DE  GOURMONT  lives  on  the  fourth  floor  of 
an  old  house  in  the  Rue  des  Saints-Peres.  A 
copper  chain  hangs  as  bell-rope  to  his  door. 
The  rare  visitor,  for  it  is  well  known  that  for 
many  years  he  has  been  a  solitary  and  seldom 
receives  even  his  friends,  pulls  the  chain  and 
waits.  The  door  opens  a  few  inches,  ready  to 
be  closed  immediately,  by  a  man  of  middle  size, 
in  a  brown  monk's  robe,  with  a  small,  round 
grey  felt  cap.  The  robe  is  fastened  with  silver 
buckles,  in  which  are  set  large  blue  stones.  The 
admitted  visitor  walks  through  a  passage  into  a 
room  whose  walls  are  covered  with  books.  In 

1  Reprinted  from  the  Fortnightly  Review. 

193 


A  -  NIGHT .  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

the  shadow  at  the  back  of  the  room  is  a  loaded 
table.  Another  table,  with  a  sloping  desk  upon 
it,  juts  out  from  the  window.  M.  de  Gourmont 
sits  in  a  big  chair  before  the  desk,  placing  his 
visitor  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  table,  with  the 
light  falling  on  his  face  so  that  he  can  observe 
his  slightest  expression.  He  pokes  at  the  little, 
brimless  skull-cap,  and  twists  it  a  quarter  of  a 
circle  on  his  head.  He  rolls  and  lights  cigar- 
ettes. In  conversation  he  often  disguises  his 
face  with  his  hand,  but  now  and  again  looks 
openly  and  directly  at  his  visitor.  His  eyes  are 
always  questioning,  and  almost  always  kindly. 
His  face  was  beautiful  in  the  youth  of  the  flesh, 
and  is  now  beautiful  in  the  age  of  the  mind,  for 
there  is  no  dead  line  in  it,  no  wrinkle,  no  minute 
feature  not  vitalised  by  intellectual  activity. 
The  nose  is  full  and  sensitive,  with  markedly 
curved  nostrils.  There  is  a  little  satiric  beard. 
The  eyebrows  lift  towards  the  temples,  as  in 
most  men  of  imagination.  The  eyes  are 
weighted  below,  as  in  most  men  of  critical 
thought.  The  two  characteristics  are,  in  M. 
de  Gourmont,  as  in  his  work,  most  noticeable 
together.  The  lower  lip,  very  full,  does  not 
pout,  but  falls  curtain-like  towards  the  chin.  It 

194 


APPENDIX 

is  the  lip  of  a  sensualist,  and  yet  of  one  whose 
sensuality  has  not  clogged  but  stimulated  the 
digestive  processes  of  his  brain.  Omar  might 
have  had  such  a  lip,  if  he  had  been  capable  not 
only  of  his  garlands  of  roses,  but  also  of  the 
essays  of  Montaigne. 

He  was  born  in  a  chateau  in  Normandy  on 
April  4th,  1858.  Among  his  ancestors  was 
Gilles  de  Gourmont,  a  learned  printer  and  en- 
graver of  the  fifteenth  century.  He  has  him- 
self collected  old  woodcuts,  and  in  UYmagier 
amused  himself  by  setting  the  most  ancient 
specimens  of  the  craft,  among  which  he  is  proud 
to  show  some  examples  of  the  work  of  his 
family,  side  by  side  with  drawings  by  Whistler 
and  Gauguin.  He  came  to  Paris  in  1883,  when 
he  obtained  a  post  in  the  Bibliotheque  Natio- 
nale.  Huysmans  was  "sous-chef  de  bureau  a 
la  direction  de  la  Surete  generale, "  and  M.  de 
Gourmont,  who  made  his  acquaintance  through 
the  dedication  of  a  book,  used  to  call  for  him 
between  four  and  five  of  the  afternoon,  and 
walk  with  him  across  the  river  to  a  cafe,  that 
has  since  disappeared,  where  he  listened  to  the 
older  man's  rather  savage  characterisations  of 
men,  women,  movements  and  books.  A  few 

195 


A  •  NIGHT    IN  •  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

years  later  he  was  held  to  be  lacking  in  patriot- 
ism, and  relieved  of  his  post  on  account  of  an 
article  urging  the  necessity  of  Franco-German 
agreement.  He  wrote  incessantly.  Merlette,  a 
rather  naive  and  awkward  little  novel,  published 
in  1886,  did  not  promise  the  work  he  was  to  do. 
It  was  no  more  than  an  exercise.  The  exercise 
was  well  done,  but  that  was  all.  It  was  the 
work  of  a  good  brain  as  yet  uncertain  of  its  per- 
sonal impulse.  But  about  this  time  he  was 
caught  in  the  stream  of  a  movement  for  which 
he  had  been  waiting,  for  which,  indeed,  the 
art  of  his  time  had  been  waiting,  the  movement 
that  was  introduced  to  English  readers  by  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons's  admirable  series  of  critical  por- 
traits.1 In  1890  he  published  Sixtine,  dedicated 
to  Villiers  de  1'Isle  Adam,  who  had  died  the 
year  before.  In  1892  appeared  Le  Latin 
Mystique,  a  book  on  the  Latin  poets  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  He  has  always  been  "a  delicate 
amateur  of  the  curiosities  of  beauty,"  though 
the  character  that  Mr.  Symons  gave  him  has 
since  become  very  inadequate.  He  edited 
Gerard  de  Nerval,  Aucassin  et  Nicolette,  and 
Rutebeuf's  La  Miracle  de  Theophile,  and 

1  The  Symbolist  Movement  in  Literature,  1899. 
196 


APPENDIX 

wrote  Lilith,  1892,  and  Theodat,  a  dramatic 
poem  in  prose  that  was  produced  by  my  friend 
M.  Paul  Fort  at  the  Theatre  d'Art  on  Decem- 
ber nth  of  the  same  year.  Several  other  curi- 
ous works  of  this  period  were  united  in  Le 
Pelerin  du  Silence.  I  extract  from  the  bibliog- 
raphy by  M.  van  Bever,  printed  in  Poetes  d'au- 
jourd'hui,  a  list  of  the  more  important  books 
that  have  followed  these  very  various  begin- 
nings: —  Le  Lime  des  Masques,  1896;  Les 
Chevaux  de  Diomede,  1897;  Le  IIme  Livre 
des  Masques,  1898;  Esthetique  de  la  langue 
fran$aise,  1899;  La  Culture  des  I  dees,  1900; 
Le  Chemin  de  Felours,  1902;  Le  Probleme  du 
Style,  1902;  Physique  de  F  Amour,  1903;  Une 
Nuit  au  Luxembourg,  1906;  besides  four  vol- 
umes of  literary  and  philosophical  criticism,  and 
four  volumes  of  comment  on  contemporary 
events. 

All  this  mass  of  work  is  vitalised  by  a  single 
motive.  Even  the  divisions  of  criticism  and 
creation  (whose  border  line  is  very  dim)  are 
made  actually  one  by  a  desire  common  to  both 
of  them,  a  desire  not  expressed  in  them,  but 
satisfied,  a  desire  for  intellectual  freedom. 
The  motto  for  the  whole  is  written  in  Une  Nuit 


197 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

au  Luxembourg:  "L'exercice  de  la  pensee  est 
unjeu,  mais  il  faut  que  ce  jeu  soit  libre  et  har- 
monieux. "  I  am  reminded  of  this  sentence 
again  and  again  in  thinking  of  M.  de  Gour- 
mont  and  his  books.  There  must  be  no  loss  of 
self-command,  none  of  the  grimaces  and  the 
awkward  movements  of  the  fanatic,  the  man 
with  whom  thought  plays.  The  thinker  must 
be  superior  to  his  thought.  He  must  make  it 
his  plaything  instead  of  being  sport  for  it.  His 
eyes  must  be  clear,  not  hallucinated;  his  arms 
his  own,  not  swung  with  the  exaggerated  ges- 
tures of  the  preacher  moved  beyond  himself  by 
his  own  words.  M.  de  Gourmont  seems  less  an 
artist  than  a  man  determined  to  conquer  his  ob- 
sessions, working  them  out  one  by  one  as  they 
assail  him,  in  order  to  regain  his  freedom.  It  is 
a  fortunate  accident  that  he  works  them  out  by 
expressing  them,  twisting  into  garlands  the 
brambles  that  impede  his  way. 


II 


M.  de  Gourmont  almost  immediately  left  the 
half-hearted  realism  of  Merlette,  and,  just  as  in 
his  scientific  writings  he  is  more  profoundly  sci- 

198 


APPENDIX 

entific  than  the  men  of  science,  so  in  his  works 
of  this  period  he  carried  to  their  uttermost  limits 
the  doctrines  of  the  symbolists.  In  his  critical 
work  the  historian  must  look  for  the  mani- 
festoes and  polemics  of  the  group  that  gathered 
in  Mallarme's  rooms  in  the  Rue  de  Rome.  The 
theories  are  in  Idealisme,  published  in  1893, 
and  in  such  essays  as  his  defence  of  Mallarme, 
written  in  1898,  and  included  in  the  Prome- 
nades Litteraires.  Of  their  practice  he  supplies 
plenty  of  examples.  "Nommer  un  objet,  c'est 
supprimer  les  trois  quarts  de  la  jouissance  du 
poeme  qui  est  faite  du  bonheur  de  deviner  peu 
a  peu;  le  suggerer  voila  le  reve. "  Mallarme 
wrote  that  in  1891,  and  during  the  'nineties, 
Remy  de  Gourmont  was  publishing  mysterious 
little  books  of  poetry  and  prose,  of  which  small 
limited  editions  were  issued  on  rare  paper,  in 
curious  covers,  with  lithographed  decorations  as 
reticent  as  the  writing.  There  is  the  Histoire 
tragique  de  la  Princesse  Phenissa  expliquee  en 
quatre  episodes,  a  play  whose  action  might  be 
seen  through  seven  veils,  a  play  whose  motive, 
never  stated  directly,  is,  perhaps,  the  destruction 
of  the  future  for  the  sake  of  the  present.  There 
is  Le  Fantome,  the  story  of  a  liaison  between 

199 


A  -  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

a  man  and  a  woman  if  you  will,  between  the 
intellect  and  the  flesh  if  you  will,  that  begins 
with  such  an  anthem  as  might  have  been  sung 
by  some  of  those  strange  beings  whom  Poe 
took  "into  the  starry  meadows  beyond  Orion, 
where,  for  pansies  and  violets  and  heartsease, 
are  the  beds  of  the  triplicate  and  triple-tinted 
suns."  The  man  —  is  it  a  man?  —  who  tells 
the  story,  ends  with  a  regret  for  something  too 
real  to  be  visible,  something  that  is  seen  because 
it  is  not  visible:  — "Je  me  sentais  froid, 
j'avais  peur  —  car  je  la  voyais,  sans  pouvoir 
m'opposer  a  cette  transformation  douloureuse 
—  je  la  voyais  s'en  aller  rejoindre  le  groupe 
des  femmes  indecises  d'ou  mon  amour  1'evait 
tiree  —  je  la  voyais  redevenir  le  fantome  qu'elles 
sont  toutes. "  There  is  Le  Livre  des  Litanies ', 
with  its  wonderful  incantation,  from  which  I 
take  the  beginning  and  end:- 

"Fleur  hypocrite, 

"Fleur  du  silence. 

"Rose  couleur  de  cuivre,  plus  frauduleuse  que  nos  joies, 
rose  couleur  de  cuivre,  embaume-nous  dans  tes  mensonges, 
fleur  hypocrite,  fleur  du  silence. 

"Rose  ame'thyste,  6toile  matinale,  tendresse  £piscopale,  rose 
am£thyste,  tudors  sur  despoitrines  devotes  et  douillettes,  gemme 
offerte  k  Marie,  6  gemme  sacristine,  fleur  hypocrite,  fleur  du  silence. 

20O 


APPENDIX 


"Rose  cardinale,  rose  couleur  du  sang  de  1'Eglise  romaine, 
rose  cardinale,  tu  fais  r£ver  les  grands  yeux  des  mignons  et  plus 
d'un  t'6pingla  au  nceud  de  sa  jarretidre,  fleur  hypocrite,  fleur 
du  silence. 

"Rose  papale,  rose  arros£e  des  mains  qui  b£nissent  le  monde, 
rose  papale,  ton  coeur  d'or  est  en  cuivre,  et  les  larmes  qui  perlent 
sur  ta  vaine  corolle,  ce  sont  les  pleurs  du  Christ,  fleur  hypocrite, 
fleur  du  silence. 

"Fleur  hypocrite, 

" Fleur  du  silence." 

Ill 


These,  and  other  things  like  them,  made  it 
possible  for  M.  de  Gourmont  to  proceed  in  the 
discovery  of  himself.  He  drank  his  mood  to 
the  dregs,  leaving  no  untried  experiment  to  clog 
his  mind  with  a  regret  as  he  moved  on.  "I 
have  always  been  excessive,"  he  says;  "I  do 
not  like  to  stop  half-way."  He  follows  each 
impulse  as  far  as  it  will  take  him,  lest,  by  chance, 
he  should  leave  some  flower  untasted  in  a  by- 
path he  has  seen  but  not  explored.  Unlike  most 
authors,  he  never  has  to  copy  himself,  and  does 
not  feel  bound,  because  he  has  written  one  book 
whose  prose  is  malachite  green,  to  produce  an- 
other of  the  same  colour.  "Un  artiste,"  said 
Wilde,  "ne  recommence  jamais  deux  fois  la 
meme  chose  .  .  .  ou  bien  c'est  qu'il  n'avaitpas 
reussi. "  The  surest  way  to  fail  in  an  experi- 

2OI 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

ment  is  to  make  it  with  a  faint  heart.    M.  de 
Gourmont  always  burns  his  boats. 

Some  preoccupations,  however  boldly  at- 
tacked, are  not  to  be  conquered  at  a  blow.  The 
preoccupation  of  sex  is  unlike  that  of  a  theory 
of  art.  Conquered  again  and  again  by  expres- 
sion, it  returns  with  a  new  face,  a  new  mystery, 
a  new  power  of  binding  the  intellect,  a  new  Gor- 
gon to  be  seen  in  the  mirror  of  art  and  decapi- 
tated. As  the  man  changes,  so  does  Medusa 
vary  her  attack,  and  so  must  he  vary  the  manner 
of  her  death.  Now  he  will  write  a  Physique  de 
V Amour,  and,  like  Schopenhauer,  relieve  him- 
self of  the  problem  of  sex  by  reducing  it  to  low- 
est terms.  Now  he  will  conquer  it  by  the  lyrical 
and  concrete  expression  of  a  novel  or  a  poem. 
Sex  continually  disturbs  him,  but  the  disturb- 
ance of  the  flesh  is  always,  sooner  or  later,  paci- 
fied by  the  mind.  All  his  later  novels  are,  like 
Sixtine,  "romans  de  la  vie  cerebrale. "  Sixtine 
is  the  story  of  a  writer's  courtship  of  a  woman 
no  more  subtle  than  himself,  but  far  more  ready 
with  her  subtlety.  It  displays  the  workings  of 
the  man's  mind  and  the  states  of  emotion 
through  which  he  passes,  by  including  in  the 
text,  as  they  were  written,  the  stories  and  poems 


2O2 


APPENDIX 

composed  under  the  influence  of  the  events. 
The  man  is  intensely  analytic,  afterwards. 
Emotion  blurs  the  windows  of  his  brain,  and 
cleans  hers  to  a  greater  lucidity.  He  always 
knows  what  he  ought  to  have  done.  "Nul 
n'avait  a  un  plus  haut  degre  la  presence  d'esprit 
du  bas  de  1'escalier."  More  than  once  the 
woman  was  his,  if  he  had  known  it  before  he 
left  her.  Finally,  she  is  carried  off  by  a  rival 
whose  method  he  has  himself  suggested.  The 
book  is  a  tragedy  of  self-consciousness,  whose 
self-conscious  heroine  is  a  prize  for  the  only 
man  who  is  ignorant  of  himself,  and,  in  the 
blindness  of  that  ignorance,  is  able  to  act.  But 
there  is  no  need  to  analyse  the  frameworks  of 
M.  de  Gourmont's  novels.  Frameworks  matter 
very  little.  They  are  all  vitalised  by  an  almost 
impatient  knowledge  of  the  subtlety  of  a 
woman's  mind  in  moments  of  pursuit  or  flight, 
and  of  the  impotence  of  a  man  whose  brain 
seeks  to  be  an  honest  mediator  between  itself 
and  his  flesh.  His  men  do  not  love  like  the 
heroes  of  ordinary  books,  and  are  not  in  the 
least  likely  to  suggest  impossible  ideals  to 
maidens.  They  are  unfaithful  in  the  flesh 
nearly  always.  They  use  one  experience  as  an 

203 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

anaesthetic  for  the  pain  they  are  undergoing  in 
another.  They  seek  to  be  masters  of  them- 
selves by  knowledge,  and  are  unhappy  without 
thinking  of  suicide  on  that  account.  Unhappi- 
ness  no  less  than  joy  is  a  thing  to  be  known. 
They  fail,  not  getting  what  they  want,  and  are 
victorious  in  understanding,  with  smiling  lips, 
their  non-success. 


IV 


One  afternoon,  in  the  Rue  des  Saints-Peres, 
M.  de  Gourmont  confirmed  the  impression  al- 
ready given  me  by  his  books  and  his  eyebrows. 
"I  have  always  been  both  romanesque  and 
critique."  Side  by  side  he  has  built  separate 
piles  of  books.  While  writing  the  curiosities  of 
symbolism  that  are  collected  in  Le  Pelerin  du 
Silence,  he  was  preparing  the  Limes  des 
Masques,  two  series  of  short  critical  portraits 
of  the  writers  of  his  time,  which,  in  the  case  of 
those  who  survive,  are  as  true  to-day  as  when 
they  were  written.  It  has  been  so  throughout. 
In  the  one  pile  are  little  volumes  of  poetry  like 
Les  Saintes  du  Paradis,  and  such  romances  as 
those  we  have  been  discussing;  in  the  other  are 

204 


APPENDIX 

works  of  science  like  the  Physique  de  V Amour, 
books  benevolently  polemical  like  Le  Probleme 
du  Style,  and  collections  of  criticism  in  which 
an  agile  intelligence  collaborates  with  a  wakeful 
sense  of  beauty. 

In  this  critical  work,  as  in  what  is  more  easily 
recognised  as  creative,  M.  de  Gourmont  builds 
for  freedom.  He  will  be  bound  neither  by  his 
own  preoccupations  nor  by  other  men's  thoughts. 
It  is  characteristic  of  him  that  his  most  personal 
essays  in  criticism  are  "Dissociations  of  Ideas." 
The  dissociation  of  ideas  is  a  method  of  thought 
that  separates  the  ideas  put  into  double  harness 
by  tradition,  just  as  the  chemist  turns  water  into 
hydrogen  and  oxygen,  with  which,  severally,  he 
can  make  other  compounds.  This,  like  most 
questions  of  thought,  is  a  question  of  words. 
Words  are  the  liberators  of  ideas,  since  without 
them  ideas  cannot  escape  from  the  flux  of  feel- 
ing into  independent  life.  They  are  also  their 
gaolers,  since  they  are  terribly  cohesive,  and 
married  words  cling  together,  binding  in  a 
lover's  knot  the  ideas  they  represent.  All  men 
using  words  in  combination  abet  these  mar- 
riages, though  in  doing  so  they  are  making  bars 
of  iron  for  the  prisons  in  which  they  speculate 

205 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  -  THE  -  LUXEMBOURG 

on  the  torn  fragment  of  sky  that  their  window 
lets  them  perceive.  Nothing  is  easier  than,  by 
taking  words  and  their  associations  as  they  are 
commonly  used,  to  strengthen  the  adherence  of 
ideas  to  each  other.  Nothing  needs  a  more 
awakened  intelligence  than  to  weaken  the  bonds 
of  such  ideas  by  separating  the  words  that  bind 
them.  That  is  the  method  of  M.  de  Gourmont. 
He  separates,  for  example,  the  idea  of  Stephane 
Mallarme  and  that  of  "decadence,"  the  idea  of 
glory  and  that  of  immortality,  the  idea  of  suc- 
cess and  that  of  beauty.  It  is,  too,  a  dissociation 
of  ideas  when  he  inquires  into  the  value  of  edu- 
cation, these  two  ideas  of  worth  and  knowledge 
being  commonly  allied.  The  method,  or  rather 
the  consciousness  of  the  method,  is  fruitful  in 
material  for  discussion,  though  this  advantage 
cannot  weigh  much  with  M.  de  Gourmont, 
whose  brain  lacks  neither  motive  power  nor 
grist  to  grind.  It  is,  for  him,  no  more  than  a 
recurrent  cleaning  of  the  glasses  through  which 
he  looks  at  the  subjects  of  his  speculation. 

He  speculates  continually,  and,  if  questions 
are  insoluble,  is  not  content  until  he  has  so  posed 
them  as  to  show  the  reason  of  their  insolubility. 
He  prefers  a  calm  question  mark  to  the  more 

206 


APPENDIX 

emotional  mark  of  exclamation,  and  is  always 
happy  when  he  can  turn  the  second  into  the  first. 
He  is  extraordinarily  thorough,  moving  always 
in  mass  and  taking  everything  with  him,  so  that 
he  has  no  footsteps  to  retrace  in  order  to  pick 
up  baggage  left  behind.  Unlike  Theseus,  he 
unrolls  no  clue  of  thread  when  he  enters  the 
cavern  of  the  Minotaur.  He  will  come  out  by 
a  different  way  or  not  at  all.  The  most  power- 
ful Minotaur  of  our  day  does  not  dismay  him. 
Confident  in  his  own  probity,  he  will  walk 
calmly  among  the  men  of  science  and  bring  an 
Esthetique  de  la  langue  fran$aise,  or  a  Physique 
de  rumour,  meat  of  unaccustomed  richness,  to 
lay  before  their  husk-fed  deity. 

In  criticism,  as  in  creation,  he  does  not  like 
things  half-done.  The  story  of  the  origin  of 
one  of  these  books  is  the  story  of  them  all. 
There  is  a  foolish  little  book  by  M.  Albalat, 
which  professes  to  teach  style  in  twenty-seven 
lessons.  M.  de  Gourmont  read  it  and  smiled; 
he  wrote  an  article,  and  still  found  something  to 
smile  at;  he  wrote  a  book,  Le  Probleme  du 
Style,  in  which,  mocking  M.  Albalat  through 
a  hundred  and  fifty-two  courteous  pages,  he 
showed,  besides  many  other  things,  that  style 

207 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

is  not  to  be  taught  in  twenty-seven  lessons,  and, 
indeed,  is  not  to  be  taught  at  all.  Then  he  felt 
free  to  smile  at  something  else. 

M.  de  Gourmont  is  careful  to  say  that  he 
brought  to  the  Esthetique  de  la  langue  fran- 
$aise,  "  ni  lois,  ni  regies,  ni  principes  peut-etre; 
je  n'apporte  rien  qu'un  sentiment  esthetique 
assez  violent  et  quelques  notions  historiques: 
voila  ce  que  je  jette  au  hasard  dans  la  grande 
cuve  ou  fermente  la  langue  de  demain."  An 
aesthetic  feeling  and  some  historical  notions 
were  sufficiently  needed  in  the  fermenting  vat 
where  the  old  French  language,  in  which  there 
is  hardly  any  Greek,  is  being  horribly  adulter- 
ated with  grainless  translations  of  good  French 
made  by  Hellenists  of  the  dictionary.  M.  de 
Gourmont  is  in  love  with  his  language,  but 
knows  that  she  is  rather  vain  and  ready  to  wear 
all  kinds  of  borrowed  plumes,  whether  or  not 
they  suit  her.  He  would  take  from  her  her 
imitation  ostrich  feathers,  and  would  hide  also 
all  ribbons  from  the  London  market,  unless  she 
first  dyes  them  until  they  fall  without  discord 
into  the  scheme  of  colour  that  centuries  have 
made  her  own.  Why  write  "high  life,"  for 
example,  or  "five  o'clock,"  or  "sleeping"? 

208 


APPENDIX 

Why  shock  French  and  English  alike  by  writing 
"Le  Club  de  Rugby"  on  a  gate  in  Tours?  A 
kingfisher  in  England  flies  very  happily  as  mar- 
tin-pecheur  in  France,  and  the  language  is  not 
so  sterile  as  to  be  unable  to  breed  words  from 
its  own  stock  for  whatever  needs  a  name. 

Physique  de  U  Amour;  Essai  sur  Uinstinct 
sexuel,  "  qui  n'est  qu'un  essai,  parce  que  la  mati- 
ere  de  son  idee  est  immense,  represente  pour- 
tant  une  ambition:  on  voudrait  agrandir  la 
psychologic  generale  de  I'amour,  la  faire  com- 
mencer  au  commencement  meme  de  1'activite 
male  et  femelle,  situer  la  vie  sexuelle  de 
rhomme  dans  le  plan  unique  de  la  sexualite 
universelle. "  It  is  a  book  full  of  illustration, 
a  vast  collection  of  facts,  and  throws  into  an- 
other fermenting  vat  than  that  of  language 
some  sufficiently  valuable  ideas.  It  lessens  the 
pride  of  man,  and,  at  the  same  time,  gives  him 
a  desperate  courage,  as  it  shows  him  that  even 
in  the  eccentricities  of  his  love-making  he  is  not 
alone,  that  the  modesty  of  his  women  is  a  faint 
hesitation  beside  the  terrified  flight  of  the  she- 
mole,  that  his  own  superiority  is  but  an  accident, 
and  that  he  must  hold  himself  fortunate  in  that 
nature  does  not  treat  him  like  the  male  bee,  and 


209 


A  -  NIGHT  •  IN  -  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

toss  his  mangled  body  disdainfully  to  earth  as 
soon  as  he  has  done  her  work.  M.  de  Gour- 
mont's  books  do  not  flatter  humanity.  They 
clear  the  eyes  of  the  strong,  and  anger  the  weak 
who  cannot  bear  to  listen  to  unpalatable  truths. 
This  book  is  in  its  eighth  edition  in  France,  and 
has  been  published  in  all  European  languages 
except  our  own. 


M.  de  Gourmont's  most  obvious  quality  is 
versatility,  and  though,  as  I  have  tried  to  point 
out,  it  is  not  difficult  to  find  a  unity  of  cause  or 
intention  in  his  most  various  expressions,  his 
lofty  and  careless  pursuit  of  his  inclinations,  his 
life  of  thought  for  its  own  sake,  has  probably 
cost  him  a  wide  and  immediate  recognition. 
That  loss  is  not  his,  but  is  borne  by  those  who 
depend  for  their  reading  on  the  names  that 
float  upward  from  the  crowd.  Even  his  ad- 
mirers complain;  some  that  he  has  not  given 
them  more  poems;  others  that  his  Physique  de 
V Amour  stands  alone  on  its  shelf;  others  that 
a  critic  such  as  he  should  have  spent  time  on 
romances;  others,  again,  that  a  writer  of  such 


210 


APPENDIX 

romances  should  have  used  any  of  his  magnif- 
icent power  in  what  they  cannot  see  to  be  crea- 
tive work.  M.  de  Gourmont  is  indifferent  to 
all  alike,  and  sits  aloft  in  the  Rue  des  Saints- 
Peres,  indulging  his  mind  with  free  and  har- 
monious play. 

In  one  of  his  books,  far  more  than  in  the 
others,  two  at  least  of  his  apparently  opposite 
activities  have  come  to  work  in  unison.  All  his 
romances,  after  and  including  Sixtine,  are  vital- 
ised by  a  never-sleeping  intellect;  but  one  in 
particular  is  a  book  whose  essence  is  both  crit- 
ical and  romantic,  a  book  of  thought  coloured 
like  a  poem  and  moving  with  a  delicate  grace  of 
narrative.  Une  Nuit  au  Luxembourg  was  pub- 
lished in  1906,  and  is  the  book  that  opens  most 
vistas  in  M.  de  Gourmont's  work.  A  god  walks 
in  the  gardens  behind  the  Odeon,  and  a  winter's 
night  is  a  summer's  morning,  on  which  the 
young  journalist  who  has  dared  to  say  "My 
friend"  to  the  luminous  unknown  in  the  church 
of  Saint-Sulpice,  hears  him  proclaim  the  forgot- 
ten truth  that  in  one  age  his  mother  has  been 
Mary,  and  in  another  Latona,  and  the  new 
truth  that  the  gods  are  not  immortal  though 
their  lives  are  long.  Flowers  are  in  bloom 


211 


A  •  NIGHT  •  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

where  they  walk,  and  three  beautiful  girls  greet 
them  with  divine  amity.  Most  of  the  book  is 
written  in  dialogue,  and  in  this  ancient  form, 
never  filled  with  subtler  essences,  doubts  are 
born  and  become  beliefs,  beliefs  become  doubts 
and  die,  while  the  sun  shines,  flowers  are  sweet, 
and  girls'  lips  soft  to  kiss.  Where  there  is  God 
he  will  not  have  Love  absent,  and  where  Love 
is  he  finds  the  most  stimulating  exercise  for  his 
brain.  Ideas  are  given  an  aesthetic  rather  than 
a  scientific  value,  and  are  used  like  the  tints  on 
a  palette.  Indeed,  the  book  is  a  balanced  com- 
position in  which  each  colour  has  its  comple- 
ment. Epicurus,  Lucretius,  St.  Paul,  Christian- 
ity, the  replenishment  of  the  earth  by  the  Jews; 
it  is  impossible  to  close  the  book  at  any  page 
without  finding  the  mind  as  it  were  upon  a 
spring-board  and  ready  to  launch  itself  in  de- 
lightful flight.  There  are  many  books  that 
give  a  specious  sensation  of  intellectual  business 
while  we  read  them.  There  are  very  few  that 
leave,  long  after  they  are  laid  aside,  stimuli  to 
independent  activity. 


212 


APPENDIX 

VI 

"II  ne  faut  pas  chercher  la  verite;  mais  de- 
vant  un  homme  comprendre  quelle  est  sa 
verite."  We  must  not  seek  in  a  man's  work 
for  the  truth,  since  there  are  as  many  truths  as 
brains;  but  it  is  worth  while  to  define  an  an- 
swer here  and  an  answer  there  out  of  the  many. 
What  is  the  answer  of  Remy  de  Gourmont? 
Quelle  est  sa  verite?  Of  what  kind  is  his  truth? 
Does  he  bring  rosemary  for  remembrance  or 
poppy  for  oblivion?  Not  in  what  he  says,  but 
in  the  point  from  which  he  says  it,  we  must  look 
for  our  indications.  His  life,  like  Sixtine,  is  a 
"roman  de  la  vie  cerebrale. "  It  is  the  spectacle 
of  a  man  whose  conquests  are  won  by  under- 
standing. For  him  the  escape  of  mysticism  was 
inadequate,  and  an  invitation  to  cowardice.  He 
would  not  abdicate,  but,  since  those  empires  are 
unstable  whose  boundaries  are  fixed,  conquer 
continually.  The  conquests  of  the  mind  are  not 
won  by  neglect.  It  is  not  sufficient  to  refuse  to 
see.  The  conqueror  must  see  so  clearly  that 
life  blushes  before  his  sober  eyes,  and,  under- 
stood, no  longer  dominates.  Remy  de  Gour- 

213 


A  •  NIGHT  -  IN  •  THE  •  LUXEMBOURG 

mont  has  suffered  and  conquered  his  suffering 
in  understanding  it.  He  would  extend  this 
dominion.  He  would  realise  all  that  happens 
to  him,  books,  a  chance  visitor,  a  meeting  in 
the  street,  the  liquid  bars  of  light  across  the 
muddy  Seine.  He  would  transmute  all  into  the 
mercurial  matter  of  thought,  until,  at  last  im- 
pregnable, he  should  see  life  from  above, 
having  trained  his  digestive  powers  to  the  same 
perfection  as  his  powers  of  reception.  Al- 
though one  of  the  Symbolists,  he  has  moved 
far  from  the  starting-point  assigned  to  that 
school  by  Mr.  Symons.  His  books  are  not 
"escapes  from  the  thought  of  death."  The 
thought  of  death  is  to  him  like  any  other 
thought,  a  rude  playfellow  to  be  mastered  and 
trained  to  fitness  for  that  free  and  harmonious 
game.  The  life  of  the  brain,  the  noblest  of  all 
battles,  that  of  a  mind  against  the  universe 
which  it  creates,  has  come  to  seem  more  im- 
portant to  him  than  the  curiosities  of  beauty  of 
which  he  was  once  enamoured.  It  has,  perhaps, 
made  him  more  of  a  thinker  than  an  artist.  In 
his  desire  to  conquer  his  obsessions  he  has  some- 
times lost  sight  of  the  unity  that  is  essential  to 
art,  a  happy  accident  in  thought.  His  later 


214 


APPENDIX 

books  have  been  the  by-products  of  a  more  in- 
timate labour.  He  has  left  them  by  the  road 
whose  end  he  has  not  hoped  to  reach,  whose 
pursuit  suffices  him.  In  Une  Nuit  au  Luxem- 
bourg, the  thinker  is  now  and  then  a  little  con- 
temptuous of  the  artist.  The  reader  is  moved 
by  something  beside  a  purely  aesthetic  emotion. 
Beside  the  breath  of  loveliness  that  blows  fit- 
fully, almost  carelessly,  through  those  flowering 
trees,  there  is  a  sturdier  wind  that  compels  a 
bracing  of  the  shoulders  and  an  opening  of  the 
chest.  The  spectacle  of  that  mind,  playing  with 
gods  and  worlds,  so  certain  of  its  own  balance, 
wakes  a  feeling  of  emulation  which  has  nothing 
to  do  with  art.  This  feeling  of  emulation,  never 
far  from  a  feeling  of  beauty,  is  the  characteris- 
tic gift  of  M.  de  Gourmont's  work.  There  was 
an  artist;  there  was  a  thinker;  there  is  a  phi- 
losopher whose  thought  loses  nothing  through 
being  beautiful,  whose  art  loses  little  through 
being  the  pathway  of  the  most  daring,  the 
surest-footed  thought. 


215 


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